by Edna Ferber
“You go to hell,” said the lady named Blanche from the far end of the table, though without anger; rather in the manner of one who is ready with a choice bit of repartee. Indeed it must have been so considered, for at its utterance Mr. Bliss Chapin’s pre-nuptial group uttered shouts of approbation.
“Shut up, you jackass,” said Ravenal then, sotto voce.
And “Oho!” bellowed the teaser. “Little Gay’s afraid he’ll get in trouble with his lady friend.”
Gay’s lady friend now disproved for all time her gentleman friend’s recent accusation that she knew nothing about the art of acting. She raised her head and gazed upon the roistering crew about the long table. Her face was very white, her dark eyes were enormous; she was smiling.
“Won’t you introduce me to your friends, Gay?” she said, in her clear and lovely voice.
“Don’t be a fool,” whispered Ravenal, at her side.
The host, Bliss Chapin, stood up rather red-faced and fumbling with his napkin. He was not sober, but his manner was formal—deferential, even. “Mrs.—uh—Rav’nal—I—uh—charmed. I rem’ber seeing you—someone pointed you out in a box at th—th—th—” he gave it up and decided to run the two words together—“ththeatre. Chapin’s my name. Bliss Chapin. Call me Bliss. Ever’body calls me Bliss. Uh—” he decided to do the honours. He indicated each guest with a graceful though vague wave of the hand.” ’S Tantine … Fifi … Gerty … Vi’let … Blanche … Mignon. Lovely girls. Lovely. But—we’ll let that pass. Uh … Georgie Skiff.… Tom Haggerty … Billy Little—Li’l’ Billee we call him. Pretty cute, huh?… Know what I mean?… Dave Lansing … Jerry Darling—that’s his actu-al name. Can you ’mazhine what the girls can do with name like that! Boys ’n girls, this’s Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal, wife of the well-known faro expert. An’ a lucky dog he is, too. No offense, I hope. Jus’ my rough way. I’m going to be married to-morr’. An’thing goes ’sevening.”
Prolonged applause and shouting. A twanging of mandolins and banjos.
“Speech!” shouted the man who had first called attention to Magnolia. “Speech by Mrs. Ravenal!”
They took it up shrilly, hoarsely, the Fifis, the Violets, the Billys, the Gertys, the Jerrys. Speech! Speech!
Ravenal got to his feet. “We’ve got to go,” he began. “Sorry——”
“Sit down! Throw him out! Foxey Gay! Shut up, Gay!”
Ravenal turned to Magnolia. “We’ll have to get out of this,” he said. He put a hand on her arm. His hand was trembling. She turned her head slowly and looked up at him, her eyes blank, the smile still on her face. “Oh, no,” she said, and shook her head. “Oh, no. I like it here, Gay dear.”
“Speech!” yelled the Tantines, the Mignons, the Daves, beating on their plates with their spoons.
Magnolia brought one hand up to her throat in a little involuntary gesture that betokened breathlessness. There was nothing else to indicate how her heart was hammering. “I—I can’t make a speech,” she began in her lovely voice.
“Speech! Speech!”
She looked at Ravenal. She felt a little sorry for him.
“But I’ll sing you a song if you’ll lend me a banjo, someone.”
She took the first of a half-dozen instruments thrust toward her.
“Magnolia!”
“Do sit down, Gay dear, and stop fidgeting about so. It’s all right. I’m glad to entertain your friends.” She still wore the little set smile. “I’m going to sing a song I learned from the Negroes when I was a little girl and lived on a show boat on the Mississippi River.” She bent her head above the banjo and began to thumb it softly. Then she threw her head back slightly. One foot tapped emphasis to the music’s cadence. Her lids came down over her eyes—closed down over them. She swayed a little, gently. It was an unconscious imitation of old Jo’s attitude. “It’s called Deep River. It doesn’t mean—anything. It’s just a song the niggers used to——” She began to sing, softly. “Deep—— river——”
When she had finished there was polite applause.
“I think it’s real sweet,” announced the one they called Violet. And began to snivel, unbecomingly.
Mr. Tom Haggerty now voiced the puzzlement which had been clouding his normally cheerful countenance.
“You call that a coon song and maybe it is. I don’t dispute you, mind. But I never heard any song like that called a coon song, and I heard a good many coon songs in my day. I Want Them Presents Back, and A Hot Time, and Mistah Johnson, Turn Me Loose.”
“Sing another,” they said, still more politely. “Maybe something not quite so sad. You’ll have us thinking we’re at prayer meeting next. First thing you know Violet here will start to repent her sins.”
So she sang All God’s Chillun Got Wings. They wagged their heads and tapped their feet to that. I got a wings. You got a wings. All o’ God’s chillun got a wings. When I get to heab’n I’m goin’ to put on my wings, I’m goin’ to fly all ovah God’s heab’n … heab’n …
Well, that, they agreed, was better. That was more like it. The red-faced cut-up rose on imaginary wings to show how he, too, was going to fly all over God’s heab’n. The forthright Blanche refused to be drawn into the polite acclaim. “If you ask me,” she announced, moodily, “I think they’re rotten.” “I like somepin’ a little more lively, myself,” said the girl they called Fifi. “Do you know What! Marry Dat Gal! I heard May Irwin sing it. She was grand.”
“No,” said Magnolia. “That’s the only kind of song I know, really.” She stood up. “I think we must be going now.” She looked across the table, her great dark eyes fixed on the red-faced bridegroom. “I hope you will be very happy.”
“A toast to the Ravenals! To Gaylord Ravenal and Mrs. Ravenal!” She acknowledged that too, charmingly. Ravenal bowed stiffly and glowered and for the second time that day wiped his forehead and chin and wrists with his fine linen handkerchief.
The chestnuts were brought round. Bliss Chapin’s crew crowded out to the veranda off the dining room. Magnolia stepped lightly up to the seat beside Ravenal in the high dog-cart. It was dusk. A sudden sharpness had come into the evening air as always, toward autumn, in that Lake Michigan region. Magnolia shivered a little and drew about her the little absurd flounced shoulder cape so recently purchased. The crowd on the veranda had caught the last tune and were strumming it now on their banjos and mandolins. The kindly light behind them threw their foolish faces into shadow. You heard their voices, plaintive, even sweet; the raucous note fled for the moment. Fifi’s voice and Jerry’s; Gerty’s voice and little Billee’s. I got a wings. You got a wings. All God’s chillun got a wings. When I get to heab’n I’m goin’ to put on my wings, I’m goin’ to fly …
Magnolia turned to wave to them as the chestnuts made the final curve in the driveway and stretched eagerly toward home.
Silence between the two for a long half hour. Then Ravenal, almost humbly: “Well—I suppose I’m in for it, Nola. Shoot!”
But she had been thinking, “I must take things in hand now. I have been like a foolish young girl when I’m really quite an old married woman. I suppose being bossed by Mama so much did that. I must take Kim in hand now. What a fool I’ve been. ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’ He was right. I have been․”
Aloud she said, only half conscious that he had spoken, “What did you say?”
“You know very well what I said. I suppose I’m in for one of your mother’s curtain lectures. Go on. Shoot and get it over.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” said Magnolia, a trifle maliciously. “What a lovely starlight night it is!…” She laughed a little. “Do you know, those dough-faced Fifis and Tantines and Mignons were just like the Ohio and Illinois farm girls, dressed up. The ignorant girls who used to come to see the show. I’ll bet that when they were on the farm, barefooted, poor things, they were Annie and Jenny and Tillie and Emma right enough.”
XVI
AND this,” said Sister Cecilia, “is the chapel.” She took still a
nother key from the great bunch on her key chain and unlocked the big gloomy double doors. It was incredible that doors and floors and wainscotings so shining with varnish could still diffuse such an atmosphere of gloom. She entered ahead of them with the air of a cicerone. It seemed to Magnolia that the corridors were tunnels of murk. It was like a prison. Magnolia took advantage of this moment to draw closer still to Kim. She whispered hurriedly in her ear:
“Kim darling, you don’t need to stay. If you don’t like it we’ll slip away and you needn’t come back. It’s so gloomy.”
“But I do like it,” said Kim in her clear, decisive voice. “It’s so shiny and clean and quiet.” In spite of her lovely Ravenal features, which still retained something of their infantile curves, she looked at that moment startlingly like her grandmother, Parthenia Ann Hawks. They followed Sister Cecilia into the chapel. Magnolia shivered a little.
In giving Kim a convent education it was not in Magnolia’s mind to prepare her for those Sunday theatrical page interviews beginning, “I was brought up by the dear Sisters in the Convent.” For that matter, the theatre as having any part in Kim’s future never once entered Magnolia’s mind. Why this should have been true it is difficult to say, considering the child’s background, together with the fact that she was seeing Camille and Ben Hur, and the Rogers Brothers in Central Park at an age when other little girls were barely permitted to go to cocoa parties in white muslin and blue sashes where they might, if they were lucky, see the funny man take the rabbit out of the hat.
The non-sectarian girls’ schools of good standing looked askance at would-be entrants whose parentage was as socially questionable, not to say bizarre, as that represented by Ravenal mère and père. The daughter of a professional gambler and an ex-show-boat actress would have received short shrift at the hands of the head mistress of Miss Dignam’s School for Girls at Somethingorother-on-the-Hudson. The convent school, then, opened its gloomy portals to as motley a collection of jeunes filles as could be imagined under one roof. In the prim dim corridors and cubicles of St. Agatha’s on Wabash Avenue, south, you might see a score of girlish pupils who, in spite of the demure face, the sleek braids, the severe uniform, the modest manner, the prunes-and-prism expression, still resembled in a startling degree this or that vivacious lady whose name was associated with the notorious Everleigh Club, or with the music halls and museums thriving along Clark Street or Madison or Dearborn. Visiting day at St. Agatha’s saw an impressive line of smart broughams outside the great solemn brick building; and the ladies who emerged therefrom, while invariably dressed in garments of sombre colour and restrained cut, still produced the effect of being attired in what is known as fast black. They gave forth a heady musky scent. And the mould of their features, even when transformed by the expression that crept over them as they gazed upon those girlish faces so markedly resembling their own, had a look as though the potter had used a heavy thumb.
The convent had been Magnolia’s idea. Ravenal had laughed when she broached the subject to him. “She’ll be well fed and housed and generally cared for there,” he agreed. “And she’ll learn French and embroidery and deportment and maybe some arithmetic, if she’s lucky. But every t—uh—every shady lady on Clark Street sends her daughter there.”
“She’s got to go somewhere, Gay. This pillar-to-post life we’re leading is terrible for a child.”
“What about your own life when you were a child? I suppose you led a prissy existence.”
“It was routine compared to Kim’s. When I went to bed in my little room on the Cotton Blossom I at least woke up in it next morning. Kim goes to sleep on north Clark and wakes up on Michigan Avenue. She never sees a child her own age. She knows more bell boys and chambermaids and waiters than a travelling man. She thinks a dollar bill is something to buy candy with and that when a stocking has a hole in it you throw it away. She can’t do the simplest problem in arithmetic, and yesterday I found her leaning over the second floor rotunda rail spitting on the heads of people in the——”
“Did she hit anybody?”
“It isn’t funny, Gay.”
“It is, too. I’ve always wanted to do it.”
“Well, so have I—but, anyway, it won’t be funny five years from now.”
St. Agatha’s occupied half of one of Chicago’s huge square blocks. Its great flight of front steps was flush with the street, but at the back was a garden discreetly protected by a thick brick wall fully ten feet high and belligerently spiked. St. Agatha herself and a whole host of attendant cherubim looked critically down upon Magnolia and Kim as they ascended the long broad flight of steps that led to the elaborately (and lumpily) carved front door. Of the two Magnolia was the more terrified. The windows glittered so sharply. The stairs were so clean. The bell, as they rang it, seemed to echo so hollowly through endless unseen halls and halls and halls. The hand that opened the door had been preceded by no sound of human footsteps. The door had loomed before them seemingly as immovable as the building itself. There was the effect of black magic in its sudden and noiseless opening. The great entrance hall waited still and dim. The black-robed figure before them was vaguely surmounted by a round white face that had the look of being no face at all but a flat circular surface on which features had been clumsily daubed.
“I came to see about placing my little girl in school.”
The flat surface broke up surprisingly into a smile. She was no longer a mysterious and sombre figure but a middle-aged person, kindly, but not especially bright. “This way.”
This way led to a small and shiny office presided over by another flat circular surface. This, in turn, gave way to a large and almost startlingly sunny room, one flight up, where sat at a desk a black-robed figure different from the rest. A large pink face. Penetrating shrewd blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. A voice that was deep without resonance. A woman with the look of the ruler. Parthy, practically, in the garb of a Mother Superior.
“Oh, my goodness!” thought Magnolia, in a panic. She held Kim’s cool little hand tight in her own agitated fingers. Of the two, she was incalculably the younger. The classrooms. The sewing room. Sister This. Sister That. The garden. Little hard benches. Prim gravel paths. Holy figures in stone brooding down upon the well-kept flower beds. Saints and angels and apostles. When all those glittering windows were dark, and the black-robed figures within lay in slumber, their hands (surely) crossed on their barren breasts and the flat circular surfaces reposed exactly in the centre of the hard pillows, and the moonlight flooded this cloistered garden spot with the same wanton witchery that enveloped a Sicilian bower, did these pious stone images turn suddenly into fauns and nymphs and dryads, Magnolia wondered, wickedly.
Aloud: “I see … I see … Oh, the refectory … I see.… Prayers … seven o’clock . . dark blue dresses … every Thursday from two to five … and sewing and music and painting as well.…”
And this was the chapel. I see. And this was her bedroom to be shared with another pupil. But she has always had her own. It is the rule. I see. I’ll let you know. It’s Kim. I know it is, but that’s her name, really. It’s—she was born—in Kentucky and Illinois and Missouri—that is—yes, it does sound—no, I don’t think she’d like to have you call her anything else, she’s so used—I’ll let you know, may I? I’d like to talk it over with her to see if she thinks she’d be happy …
In the garden, in various classrooms, in the corridors, and on the stairs they had encountered girls from ten to sixteen or even eighteen years of age, and they were all dressed exactly alike, and they had all flashed a quick prim look at the visitors from beneath demure lids. Magnolia had sensed a curious undercurrent of plot, of mischief. Hidden secret thoughts scurried up the bare varnished halls, lurked grinning in the stairway niches.
They were back in the big sunny second-floor room after their tour of inspection. The pink-faced Parthy person was regarding them with level brows. Magnolia was clinging more tightly than ever to Kim’s hand. It was as thou
gh the child were supporting her, not she the child.
“But I know now whether I like it or not,” Kim had spoken up, astonishingly. “I like it.”
Magnolia was horrified to find that she had almost cried, “Oh, no! No, Kim!” aloud. She said, instead, “Are you sure, darling? You needn’t stay unless you want to. Mother just brought you to see if you might like it.”
“I do,” repeated Kim, patiently, as one speaks to an irritating child.
Magnolia was conscious of a sinking sense of disappointment. She had hoped, perversely enough, that Kim would stamp her feet, throw herself screaming on the floor, and demand to be carried out of the bare clean orderly place back to the delightful welter of Clark Street. She could not overcome the feeling that in thus bestowing upon Kim a ladylike education and background she was depriving her of something rich and precious and colourful. She thought of her own childhood. She shut her eyes so as to see more clearly the pictures passing in her mind. Deep rivers. Wide rivers. Willows by the water’s edge trailing gray-green. Dogwood in fairy bloom. Darkies on the landing. Plinketty-plunk-plunk-plunk, plinketty-plunk-plunk-plunk. Cotton bales. Sweating black bodies. Sue, ef he loves yuh, go with him. To-morrow night, ladies and gentlemen, that magnificent comedy-drama, Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. The band, red-coated, its brass screaming defiance at the noonday sun.
The steely blue eyes in the pink face surrounded by the white wimple and 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.