by Edna Ferber
“See it all, Nollie,” he had said to her in the old Cotton Blossom days, when Parthy would object to their taking this or that jaunt ashore between shows. “Don’t you believe ’em when they say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Biggest lie ever was. See it all and go your own way and nothing’ll hurt you. If what you see ain’t pretty, what’s the odds! See it anyway. Then next time you don’t have to look.” Magnolia, gazing about her, decided that she was seeing it all.
The bulk of the money had gone at faro. The suckers played roulette, stud poker, hazard, the bird-cage, chuck-a-luck (the old army game). But your gambler played faro. Faro was Gaylord Ravenal’s game, and he played at Hankins’—not at George Hankins’ where they catered to the cheap trade who played percentage games—but at Jeff Hankins’ or Mike McDonald’s where were found the highest stakes in Chicago. Faro was not a game with Ravenal—it was for him at once his profession, his science, his drug, his drink, his mistress. He had, unhappily, as was so often the case with your confirmed gambler, no other vice. He rarely drank, and then abstemiously; smoked little and then a mild cigar, ate sparingly and fastidiously; eschewed even the diamond ring and shirt-stud of his kind.
The two did not, of course, watch the money go, or despair because it would soon be gone. There seemed to be plenty of it. There always would be enough. Next week they would invest it securely. Ravenal had inside tips on the market. He had heard of a Good Thing. This was not the right time, but They would let him know when the magic moment was at hand. In the meantime there was faro. And there were the luxurious hotel rooms with their soft thick carpets, and their big comfortable beds; ice water tinkling at the door in answer to your ring; special dishes to tempt the taste of Mr. Ravenal and his lady. The sharp-eyed gentleman in evening clothes who stood near the little ticket box as you entered the theatre said, “Good-evening, Mr. Ravenal,” when they went to Hooley’s or McVicker’s or the Grand Opera House, or Kohl and Castle’s. The heads of departments in Mandel’s or Carson Pirie’s or even Marshall Field’s said, “I have something rather special to show you, Mrs. Ravenal. I thought of you the minute it came in.”
Sometimes it seemed to Magnolia that the Cotton Blossom had been only a phantom ship—the rivers a dream—a legend.
It was all very pleasant and luxurious and strange. And Magnolia tried not to mind the clang of Clark Street by day and by night. The hideous cacophony of noise invaded their hotel apartment and filled its every corner. She wondered why the street-car motor-men jangled their warning bells so persistently. Did they do it as an antidote to relieve their own jangled nerves? Pay-pes! MO’-nin’ pay-pes! Crack! Crack! Crackcrackcrack! The shooting gallery across the street. Someone passing the bedroom door, walking heavily and clanking the metal disk of his room key. The sound of voices, laughter, from the street, and the unceasing shuffle of footsteps on stone. Whee-e-e-e-e! Whoop-a! Ye-e-eow! A drunkard. She knew about that, too. Part of her recently acquired knowledge. Ravenal had told her about Big Steve Rowan, the three-hundred-pound policeman, who, partly because of his goatee and moustache, and partly because of his expert manipulation of his official weapon, was called the Jack of Clubs.
“You’ll never see Big Steve arrest a drunk at night,” Gay had explained to her, laughing. “No, sir! Nor any other Clark Street cop if he can help it. If they arrest a man they have to appear against him next morning at the nine o’clock police court. That means getting up early. So if he’s able to navigate at all, they pass him on down the street from corner to corner until they get him headed west somewhere, or north across the bridge. Great system.”
All this was amusing and colourful, perhaps, but scarcely conducive to tranquillity and repose. Often Magnolia, lying awake by the side of the sleeping man, or lying awake awaiting his late return, would close her stinging eyelids the better to visualize and sense the deep velvet silence of the rivers of her girlhood—the black velvet nights, quiet, quiet. The lisping cluck-suck of the water against the hull.
Clang! MO’nin’ pay-pes! Crack! E-e-eee-yow!
And then, suddenly, one day: “But, Gay dear, how do you mean you haven’t one hundred dollars? It’s for that bronze-green velvet that you like so much, though I always think it makes me look sallow. You did urge me to get it, you know, dear. And now this is the third time they’ve sent the bill. So if you’ll give me the money—or write a check, if you’d rather.”
“I tell you I haven’t got it, Nola.”
“Oh, well, to-morrow’ll do. But please be sure tomorrow, because I hate——”
“I can’t be any surer to-morrow than I am to-day. I haven’t got a hundred dollars in the world. And that’s a fact.”
Even after he had finished explaining, she did not understand; could not believe it; continued to stare at him with those great dark startled eyes.
Bad luck. At what? Faro. But, Gay—thousands! Well, thousands don’t last for ever. Took a flyer. Flyer? Yes. A tip on the market. Market? The stock market. Stock? Oh, you wouldn’t understand. But all of it, Gay? Well, some of it lost at faro. Where? Hankins? How much? What does it matter?—it’s gone. But, Gay, how much at faro? Oh, a few thousands. Five? Y-y-yes. Yes, five. More than that? Well, nearer ten, probably.
She noticed then that the malacca cane was gone. She slipped her diamond ring off her finger. Gave it to him. With the years, that became an automatic gesture.
Thus the change in their mode of living did not come about gradually. They were wafted, with Cinderellalike celerity, from the coach-and-four to the kitchen ashes. They left the plush and ice water and fresh linen and rich food and luxurious service of the Sherman House for a grubby little family hotel that was really a sort of actors’ boarding house, on the north side, just across the Clark Street bridge, on Ontario Street. It was, Ravenal said, within convenient walking distance of places.
“What places?” Magnolia asked. But she knew. A ten minutes’ saunter brought you to Gamblers’ Alley. In the next fifteen years there was never a morning when Gaylord Ravenal failed to prove this interesting geographical fact.
XIV
THE Ravenal reverses, if they were noticed at all in Gamblers’ Alley, went politely unremarked. There was a curious and definite code of honour among the frequenters of Chicago’s Levee. You paid your gambling debts. You never revealed your own financial status by way of conversation. You talked little. You maintained a certain physical, sartorial, and social standard in the face of all reverses. There were, of course, always unmistakable signs to be read even at the most passing glance. You drew your conclusions; made no comment. If you were seen to breakfast for days—a week—two weeks—at the Cockeyed Bakery, you were greeted by your confrères with the same suavity that would have been accorded you had you been standing treat at Billy Boyle’s or the Palmer House. Your shoe might be cracked, but it must shine. Your linen might be frayed, but it must be clean. Your cheeks were perhaps a trifle hollow, but they must be shaven and smell pleasantly of bay rum. You might dine at Burkey and Milan’s (Full Meal 15c.) with ravenous preliminary onslaughts upon the bread-and-butter and piccalilli. But you consumed, delicately and fastidiously, just so much and no more of the bountiful and rich repast spread out for your taking at Jeff Hankins’ or at Mike McDonald’s. Though your suit was shabby, it must bear the mark of that tailor to the well-dressed sporting man—Billy McLean. If you were too impecunious for Hetty Chilson’s you disdained the window-tapping dives on Boiler Avenue and lower Clark Street and State; the sinister and foul shanties of Big Maud and her ilk. You bathed, shaved, dressed, ate, smoked with the same exotic care when you were broke as when luck was running your way. Your cigar was a mild one (also part of the code), and this mild one usually a dead one as you played. And no one is too broke for one cigar a day. Twelve o’clock—noon—found you awake. Twelve o’clock—midnight—found you awake. Somewhere between those hours you slept the deep sweet sleep of the abstemious. You were, in short, a gambler—and a gentleman.
Thus, when the Rave
nals moved, perforce, from the comfort of the Sherman to the threadbare shabbiness of the Ontario Street boarding house, there was nothing in Gaylord Ravenal’s appearance to tell the tale. If his cronies knew of his financial straits, they said nothing. Magnolia had no women friends. During the year or more of their residence in Chicago she had been richly content with Kim and Gay. The child had a prim and winning gravity that gave her a curiously grown-up air.
“Do you know, Gay,” Magnolia frequently said, “Kim sometimes makes me feel so gawky and foolish and young. When she looks at me after I’ve been amused about something, or am enthusiastic or excited or—you know—anyway, she looks at me out of those big eyes of hers, very solemn, and I feel—— Oh, Gay, you don’t think she resembles—that is—do you think she is much like Mama?”
“God forbid!” ejaculated Ravenal, piously.
Kim had been Magnolia’s delight during the late morning hours and the early afternoon. In company with the stolid nurse, they had fared forth in search of such amusement as the city provided for a child brought up amidst the unnatural surroundings of this one. The child had grown accustomed to seeing her nurse stand finger on lips, eyes commanding silence, before the closed door of her parents’ room at ten in the morning—at eleven, even—and she got it into her baby head that this attitude, then, was the proper and normal one in which to approach the closed door of that hushed chamber. Late one morning Magnolia, in nightgown and silken wrapper, had opened this door suddenly to find the child stationed there, silent, grave-eyed, admonitory, while in one corner, against the door case, reposed the favourite doll of her collection—a lymphatic blonde whose eyes had met with some unfortunate interior mishap which gave them a dying-calf look. This sprawling and inert lady was being shushed in a threatening and dramatic manner by the sternly maternal Kim. There was, at sight of this, that which brought the quick sting of tears to Magnolia’s eyes. She gathered the child up in her arms, kissed her passionately, held her close, brought her to Ravenal as he lay yawning.
“Gay, look at her! She was standing by the door telling her doll not to make any noise. She’s only a baby. We don’t pay enough attention to her. Do you think I neglect her? Standing there by the door! And it’s nearly noon. Oh, Gay, we oughtn’t to be living here. We ought to be living in a house—a little house where it’s quiet and peaceful and she can play.”
“Lovely,” said Gay. “Thebes, for example. Now don’t get dramatic, Nola, for God’s sake. I thought we’d finished with that.”
With the change in their fortunes the English nurse had vanished with the rest. She had gone, together with the hackneys, the high smart yellow cart, the violets, the green velvets, the box seats at the theatre, the champagne. She, or her counterpart, never returned, but many of the lost luxuries did, from time to time. There were better days to come, and worse. Their real fortune gone, there now was something almost humdrum and methodical about the regularity of their ups and downs. There rarely was an intermediate state. It was feast or famine, always. They actually settled down to the life of a professional gambler and his family. Ravenal would have a run of luck at faro. Presto! Rooms at the Palmer House. A box at the races. The theatre. Supper at Rector’s after the theatre. Hello, Gay! Evening, Mrs. Ravenal. Somebody’s looking mighty lovely to-night. A new sealskin sacque. Her diamond ring on her finger. Two new suits of clothes for Ravenal, made by Billy McLean. A little dinner for Gay’s friends at Cardinal Bemis’s famous place on Michigan Avenue. You couldn’t fool the Cardinal.
He would ask suavely, “What kind of a dinner, Mr. Ravenal?”
If Gay replied, “Oh—uh—a cocktail and a little red wine,” Cardinal Bemis knew that luck was only so-so, and that the dinner was to be good, but plainish. But if, in reply to the tactful question, Gay said, magnificently, “A cocktail, Cardinal; claret, sauterne, champagne, and liqueurs,” Bemis knew that Ravenal had had a real run of luck and prepared the canvasbacks boiled in champagne; or there were squabs or plover, with all sorts of delicacies, and the famous frozen watermelon that had been plugged, filled with champagne, put on ice for a day, and served in such chunks of scarlet fragrance as made the nectar and ambrosia of the gods seem poor, flavourless fare indeed.
Magnolia, when luck was high, tried to put a little money by as she had instinctively been prompted to do during those first months of their marriage, when they still were on the Cotton Blossom. But she rarely had money of her own. Gay, when he had ready cash, was generous—but not with the handing over of the actual coin itself.
“Buy yourself some decent clothes, Nola; and the kid. Tell them to send me the bill. That thing you’re wearing is a terrible sight. It seems to me you haven’t worn anything else for months.” Which was true enough. There was something fantastic about the magnificence with which he ignored the reason for her not having worn anything else for months. It had been, certainly, her one decent garment during the lean period just passed, and she had cleaned and darned and refurbished to keep it so. Her experience in sewing during the old Cotton Blossom days stood her in good stead now.
There were times when even the Ontario Street hotel took on the aspect of unattainable luxury. That meant rock bottom. Then it was that the Ravenals took a room at three dollars a week in a frowzy rooming house on Ohio or Indiana or Erie; the Bloomsbury of Chicago. There you saw unshaven men, their coat collars turned up in artless attempt to conceal the absence of linen, sallying forth, pail in hand, at ten or eleven in the morning in search of the matutinal milk and rolls to accompany the coffee that was even now cooking over the gas jet. Morning was a musty jade on these streets; nothing fresh and dewy and sparkling about her. The ladies of the neighbourhood lolled huge, unwieldy, flaccid, in wrappers. In the afternoon you saw them amazingly transformed into plump and pinkly powdered persons, snugly corseted, high-heeled, rustling in silk petticoats, giving out a heady scent. They were friendly voluble ladies who beamed on the pale slim Magnolia, and said, “Won’t you smile for me just a little bit? H’m?” to the sedate and solemn-eyed Kim.
Magnolia, too, boiled coffee and eggs over the gas jet in these lean times. Gravely she counted out the two nickels that would bring her and Kim home from Lincoln Park on the street car. Lincoln Park was an oasis—a life-giving breathing spot to the mother and child. They sallied forth in the afternoon; left the gas jet, the three-dollar room, the musty halls, the stout females behind them. There was the zoo; there was the lake; there was the grass. If the lake was their choice it led inevitably to tales of the rivers. It was in this way that the background of her mother’s life was first etched upon Kim’s mind. The sight of the water always filled Magnolia with a nostalgia so acute as to amount to an actual physical pain.
The childish treble would repeat the words as the two sat on a park bench facing the great blue sea that was Lake Michigan.
“You remember the boat, don’t you, Kim?”
“Do I?” Kim’s diction was curiously adult, due, doubtless, to the fact that she had known almost no children.
“Of course you do, darling. Don’t you remember the river, and Grandma and Grandpa——”
“Cap’n!”
“Yes! I knew you remembered. And all the little darkies on the landing. And the band. And the steam organ. You used to put your hands over your ears and run and hide, because it frightened you. And Jo and Queenie.”
“Tell me about it.”
And Magnolia would assuage her own longing by telling and retelling the things she liked to remember. The stories, with the years, became a saga. Figures appeared, vanished, reappeared. The rivers wound through the whole. Elly, Schultzy, Julie, Steve; the man in the box with the gun; the old Creole Belle and Magnolia’s first trip on the Mississippi; Mr. Pepper and the pilot house; all these became familiar and yet legendary figures and incidents to the child. They were her Three Bears, her Bo-peep, her Red Riding Hood, her Cinderella. Magnolia must have painted these stories with the colour of life itself, for the child never wearied of them.
&n
bsp; “Tell me the one about the time you were a little girl and Gra’ma locked you in the bedroom because she didn’t want you to see the show and you climbed out of the window in your nightie …”
Kim Ravenal was probably the only white child north of the Mason and Dixon line who was sung to sleep to the tune of those plaintive, wistful Negro plantation songs which later were to come into such vogue as spirituals. They were the songs that Magnolia had learned from black Jo and from Queenie, the erstwhile rulers of the Cotton Blossom galley. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, she sang. O, Wasn’t Dat a Wide River! And, of course, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Kim loved them. When she happened to be ill with some childhood ailment, they soothed her. Magnolia sang these songs, always, as she had learned to sing them in unconscious imitation of the soft husky Negro voice of her teacher. Through the years of Kim’s early childhood, Magnolia’s voice might have been heard thus wherever the shifting Ravenal fortunes had tossed the three, whether the red-plush luxury of the Sherman House, the respectable dulness of the family hotel, or the sordid fustiness of the cheap rooming house. Once, when they were living at the Sherman, Magnolia, seated in a rocking chair with Kim in her arms, had stopped suddenly in her song at a curious sound in the corridor. She had gone swiftly to the door, had opened it, and had been unable to stifle a little shriek of surprise and terror mingled. There stood a knot of black faces, teeth gleaming, eyes rolling. Attracted by the songs so rarely heard in the North, the Sherman House bell boys and waiters had eagerly gathered outside the closed door in what was, perhaps, as flattering and sincere a compliment as ever a singer received.