Part 18
Ravenal had selected it for her, of course. He always accompanied her on her shopping trips. He liked to loll elegantly at ease like a pasha while the keen-eyed saleswomen brought out this gown and that for his expert inspection. To these alert ladies it was plain to see that Magnolia knew little enough about chic attire. The gentleman, though—he knew what was what. Magnolia had been aghast at the cost of that first fur coat, but then, how should she know of such things? Between them, she and Parthy had made most of the costumes she had worn in her _Cotton Blossom_ days, both for stage and private use. The new coat was a black astrakhan jacket; the fur lay in large smooth waves known as baby lamb. Magnolia said it made her feel like a cannibal to wear a thing like that. The salesladies did not smile at this, but that was all right because Magnolia had not intended that they should. The revers and cuffs were of Russian sable, dark and rich and deep; and it had large mutton-leg sleeves—large enough to contain her dress sleeves comfortably, with a little expert aid in the way of stuffing. “Stuff my sleeves in,” was one of the directions always given a gentleman when he assisted a lady with her wrap.
This royal garment had cost——“Oh, Gay!” Magnolia had protested, in a low shocked voice (but not so low that the sharp-eared saleswomen failed to hear it)—“Oh, Gay! I honestly don’t think we ought——”
“Mrs. Potter Palmer,” spoke up the chief saleswoman in a voice at once sharp and suave, “has a coat identically similar. They are the only two of the kind in the whole country. To tell you the truth, I think the sable skins on this garment of madam’s are just a little finer than Mrs. Palmer’s. Though perhaps it’s just that madam sets it off better, being so young and all.”
He liked her to wear, nestling in the rich depths of the sable revers, a bunch of violets. For the theatre she had one of those new winged bonnets, representing a butterfly, cunningly contrived of mousseline de soie wired and brilliantly spangled so that it quivered and trembled with the movements of her head and sparkled enchantingly. Kim adored the smell of the violet-scented creature who kissed her good-night and swept out, glittering. The impression must have gone deep, deep into the childish mind, for twenty years later she still retained a sort of story-book mental picture of this black-haired creamy mother who would come in late of a winter afternoon laughing and bright-eyed after a drive up Grand Boulevard in the sleigh behind the swift English hackneys. This vision would seem to fill the warm room with a delightful mixture of violets, and fur, and cold fresh air and velvet and spangles and love and laughter. Kim would plunge her face deep into the soft scented bosom.
“Oh, Gay, do see how she loves the violets! You won’t mind if I take them off and put them here in this glass so she—— No, you mustn’t buy me any fresh ones. Please! I wish she didn’t look quite so much like me . . . her mouth . . . but it’s going to be a great wide one, like mine. . . . Oh, Bernhardt! Who wants her little girl to look like Bernhardt! Besides, Kim isn’t going to be an actress.”
At the end of a year or so of this the money was gone—simply gone. Of course, it hadn’t been only the hackneys, and the races, and the trap, and the furs, and the suppers and the theatres and dresses and Gay’s fine garments and the nurse and the hotel. For, as Ravenal explained, the hackneys hadn’t even been pure-blooded, which would have brought them up to one thousand each. He had never been really happy about them, because of a slight blot on their family escutcheon which had brought them down to a mere six hundred apiece. This flaw was apparent, surely, to no one who was not an accredited judge at a horse show. Yet when Ravenal and Magnolia on Derby Day joined the gay stream of tallyhos, wagonettes, coaches, phaetons, tandems, cocking carts, and dog-carts sweeping up Michigan Avenue and Grand Boulevard toward the Washington Park race track he was likely to fall into one of his moody silences and to flick the hackneys with little contemptuous cuts of the long lithe whip in a way that only they—and Magnolia—understood. On such occasions he called them nags.
“Ah! That off nag broke again. That’s because they’re not thoroughbreds.”
“But, Gay, you’re hurting their mouths, sawing like that.”
“Please, Nola. This isn’t a Mississippi barge I’m driving.”
She learned many things that first year, and saw so much that part of what she saw was mercifully soon forgotten. You said Darby Day, very English. You pretended not to mind when your husband went down to speak to Hetty Chilson and her girls in their box. For that matter, you pretended not to see Hetty Chilson and her girls at all, though they had driven out in a sort of private procession of victorias, landaus, broughams, and were by far the best-dressed women at the races. They actually set the styles, Gay had told her. Hetty Chilson’s girls wore rich, quiet, almost sedate clothes; and no paint on their faces. They seemed an accepted part of the world in which Gaylord Ravenal moved. Even in the rough life of the rivers, Magnolia had always understood that women of Hetty Chilson’s calling simply did not exist in the public sense. They were not of the substance of everyday life, but were shadows, sinister, menacing, evil. But with this new life of Magnolia’s came the startling knowledge that these ladies played an important part in the social and political life of this huge sprawling Mid-western city. This stout, blonde, rather handsome woman who carried herself with an air of prosperous assurance; whose shrewd keen glance and hearty laugh rather attracted you—this one was Hetty Chilson. The horsewomen you saw riding in the Lincoln Park bridle path, handsomely habited in black close-fitting riding clothes, were, likely as not, Hetty Chilson’s girls. She was actually a power in her way. When strangers were shown places of interest in Chicago—the Potter Palmer castle on Lake Shore Drive, the Art Museum, the Stockyards, the Auditorium Hotel, the great mansions of Phil Armour and his son on Michigan Avenue, with the garden embracing an entire city block—Hetty Chilson’s place, too, was pointed out (with a lowering of the voice, of course, and a little leer, and perhaps an elbow dug into the ribs). A substantial brick house on Clark Street, near Polk, with two lions, carved in stone, absurdly guarding its profane portals.
“Hetty Chilson’s place,” Gay explained to his wide-eyed young wife, “is like a club. You’re likely to find every prominent politician in Chicago there, smoking and having a sociable drink. And half the political plots that you read about in the newspapers later are hatched at Hetty’s. She’s as smart as they make ’em. Bought a farm, fifteen acres, out at Ninetieth and State, for her father and mother. And she’s got a country place out on the Kankakee River, near Momence—about sixty miles south of here—that’s known to have one of the finest libraries in the country. Cervantes—Balzac—rare editions. Stable full of horses—rose garden——”
“But, Gay dear!”
You saw Hetty driving down State Street during the shopping hour in her Kimball-made Victoria, an equipage such as royalty might have used, its ebony body fashioned by master craftsmen, its enamel as rich and deep and shining as a piano top. Her ample skirts would be spread upon the plum-coloured cushions. If it was summer the lace ruffles of her sunshade would plume gently in the breeze. In winter her mink coat swathed her full firm figure. One of her girls sat beside her, faultlessly dressed, pale, unvivacious. Two men in livery on the box. Harness that shone with polished metal and jingled splendidly. Two slim, quivering, high-stepping chestnuts. Queen of her world—Chicago’s underworld.
“But, Gay dear!”
“Well, how about France!”
“France?”
“How about the women you used to read about—learned about them in your history books, for that matter, at school? Pompadour and Maintenon and Du Barry! Didn’t they mix up in the politics of their day—and weren’t they recognized? Courtesans, every one of them. You think just because they wore white wigs and flowered silk hoops and patches——”
A little unaccustomed flush surged over Magnolia’s pallor—the deep, almost painful red of indignation. She was an inexperienced woman, but she was no fool. These last few months had taught her many things. Also the teachings of her school-teacher mother had not, after all, been quite forgotten, it appeared.
“She’s a common woman of the town, Gaylord Ravenal. All the wigs and patches and silks in the world wouldn’t make her anything else. She’s no more a Du Barry than your Hinky Dink is a—uh—Mazarin.”
It was as though he took a sort of perverse pleasure in thus startling her. It wasn’t that she was shocked in the prim sense of the word. She was bewildered and a little frightened. At such times the austere form and the grim visage of Parthenia Ann Hawks would rise up before her puzzled eyes. What would Parthy have said of these unsavoury figures now passing in parade before Magnolia’s confused vision—Hetty Chilson, Doc Haggerty, Mike McDonald, “Prince” Varnell, Effie Hankins? Uneasy though she was, Magnolia could manage to smile at the thought of her mother’s verbal destruction of this raffish crew. There were no half tones in Parthy’s vocabulary. A hussy was a hussy; a rake a rake. But her father, she thought, would have been interested in all this, and more than a little amused. His bright brown eyes would have missed nothing; the little nimble figure would have scampered inquisitively up and down the narrow and somewhat sinister lane that lay between Washington and Madison streets, known as Gamblers’ Alley; he would have taken a turn at faro; appraised the Levee ladies at their worth: visited Sam T. Jack’s Burlesque Show over on Madison, and Kohl & Middleton’s Museum, probably, and Hooley’s Theatre certainly. Nothing in Chicago’s Levee life would have escaped little Captain Andy, and nothing would have changed him.
“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 motormen 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 to-morrow, 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 Cinderella-like 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 Ravenals 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.