Part 21

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 another 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 though 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.

Descending the great broad flight of outside steps Magnolia said, like a child, “From now until Monday we’ll do things, shall we? Fun. What would you like to do?”

“Oh, a matinée on Saturday——” began Kim eagerly. Magnolia was enormously relieved. She had been afraid that this brief glimpse into the more spiritual life might already have had a chastening effect upon the cosmopolitan Kim.

Thus the child was removed from the pernicious atmosphere of the Chicago Levee just when the Levee itself began to feel the chastening hand of reform. Suddenly, overnight, Chicago went civic. For a quarter of a century she had been a strident, ample-bosomed, loud-mouthed Rabelaisian giantess in red satin and diamonds, who kept open house day and night and welcomed all comers. There were food and drink and cheer. Her great muscular arms embraced ranchers from Montana and farmers from Indiana and bankers from New York. At Bath House John’s Workingmen’s Exchange you got a tub of beer for a nickel; the stubble-faced bums lined the curb outside his ceaselessly swinging door on Clark Street. The visiting ranchers and farmers and bankers were told to go over to the Palmer House and see the real silver dollars sunk in the tiled floor of that hostelry’s barroom. The garrulous Coughlin, known as The Bath, and the silent little Hinky Dink Mike Kenna were Chicago’s First Ward aldermen and her favourite naughty sons. The roulette wheels in Gamblers’ Alley spun merrily by day and by night. The Mayor of the city called a genial, “Hope you’re all winning, boys!” as he dropped in for a sociable drink and a look at the play; or even to take a hand. “What’ll you have?” was Chicago’s greeting, and “Don’t care if I do,” her catch phrase. Hetty Chilson was the recognized leader of her sinister world, and that this world happened to be prefaced by the qualifying word, “under” made little difference in Chicago’s eyes. Pawnshops, saloons, dives, and gambling houses lined Clark Street from Twelfth to the river, and dotted the near-by streets for blocks around. The wind-burned ranchmen in bearskin coats and sombreros at Polk and Clark were as common a sight as the suave white-fingered gentry in Prince Alberts and diamonds at Clark and Madison. It was all one to Chicago. “Game upstairs, gentlemen! Game upstairs!”

New York, eyeing her Western cousin through disapproving lorgnettes, said, “What a crude and vulgar person!”

“Me!” blustered Chicago, dabbing futilely at the food and wine spots on her broad satin bosom. “Me! I’ll learn you I’m a lady.”

The names of University of Chicago professors (Economics Department) began to appear on the lists of aldermanic candidates. Earnest young men and women with notebooks and fountain pens knocked at barred doors, stated that they were occupied in compiling a Survey, and asked intimate questions. Down came whole blocks of rats’ nests on Clark and Dearborn, with the rats scuttling frantically to cover. Up went office buildings that actually sneered down upon the Masonic Temple’s boasted height. Brisk gentlemen in eyeglasses and sack suits whisked in and out of these chaste edifices. The clicking sound to be heard on Clark Street was no longer that of the roulette wheel but of the stock market ticker and the Western Union transmitter.

It was rumoured that they were going to close Jeff Hankins’. They were going to close Mike McDonald’s. They were going to banish the Washington Park race track.

“They can’t do it,” declared Gaylord Ravenal.

“Oh, can’t we!” sneered the reformers. Snick-snack, went the bars on Hankins’ doors and on Mike McDonald’s. It actually began to be difficult to find an open game. It began to be well-nigh impossible. It came to such a pass that you had to know the signal knock. You had to submit to a silent scrutiny from unseen eyes peering through a slit somewhere behind a bland closed door. The Prince Alberts grew shiny. The fine linen showed frayed edges. The diamonds reposed unredeemed for longer and longer periods at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s. The Ravenal ring and the succession of sealskin sacques seemed permanently to have passed out of the Ravenal possession. The malacca stick, on the other hand, was now a fixture. It had lost its magic. It was no longer a symbol of security. The day was past when its appearance at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s meant an I O U for whatever sum Gay Ravenal’s messenger might demand. There actually were mornings when even the Cockeyed Bakery represented luxury. As for breakfast at Billy Boyle’s! An event.

The Ravenals’ past experience in Chicago seemed, in comparison with their present precarious position, a secure and even humdrum existence. Ohio and Ontario streets knew them for longer and longer periods. Now when Magnolia looked into the motley assemblage of objects in the more obscure pawnshop windows, she was likely to avert her eyes quickly at recognition of some object not only intimate but familiar. Magnolia thought of Kim, safe, secure, comfortable, in the convent on Wabash Avenue.

“I must have felt this thing coming,” she said to Ravenal. “Felt it in my bones. She’s out of all this. It makes me happy just to think of it; to think of her there.”

“How’re you going to keep her there?” demanded Ravenal, gloomily. “I’m strapped. You might as well know it, if you don’t already. I’ve had the damnedest run of luck.”

Magnolia’s eyes grew wide with horror. “Keep her there! Gay! We’ve got to. I wouldn’t have her knocking around here with us. Gay, can’t you do something? Something real, I mean. Some kind of work like other—I mean, you’re so wonderful. Aren’t there things—positions—you know—with banks or—uh—those offices where they buy stocks and sell them and make money in wheat and—wheat and things?” Lamely.

Ravenal kissed her. “What a darling you are, Nola. A darling simpleton.”

It was a curious and rather terrible thing, this love bond between them. All that Parthy had grimly predicted had come to pass. Magnolia knew him for what he was. Often she hated him. Often he hated her. Often he hated her because she shamed him with her gaiety, her loyalty, her courage, her tenderness. He was not true to her. She knew this now. He knew she knew this. She was a one-man woman. Frequently they quarrelled hideously. Tied to you. . . . Tied! God knows I’d be happier without you. You’ve never brought me anything but misery. . . . Always finding fault. . . . Put on those fine lady airs with me. What’d I take you out of! . . . An honest living, anyway. Look people in the face. Accusations. Bitterness. Longing. Passion. The long periods of living in sordid surroundings made impossible most of the finer reticences. Garments washed out in the basin. Food cooked over the gas jet. One room. One bed. Badly balanced meals. Reproaches. Tears. Sneers. Laughter. Understanding. Reconciliation.

They loved each other. Over and above and through and beneath it all, thick and thin, warp and woof, they loved each other.

It was when their fortunes were at lowest ebb; when the convent tuition had now been two terms unpaid; when the rent on the Ontario Street lodgings was overdue; when even Ravenal, handsome and morose, was forced to content himself with the coffee and rolls of the bedroom breakfast; when a stroll up Clark Street meant meeting a dozen McLean suits as shabby as his own—it was at this unpropitious time that Parthenia Ann Hawks was seized with the idea of visiting her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandchild in Chicago. Her letters always came to the Sherman House—had been called for there through these years though the fluctuations of fortune had carried the Ravenals away from the hotel and back again with a tide-like regularity. Twice Magnolia had taken Kim to see her grim grandmamma at Thebes when the _Cotton Blossom_ was in for repairs during the winter season. These visits had always been timed when the Ravenal tide was high. Magnolia and Kim had come back to Thebes on the crest of a wave foaming with silks and laces and plumes and furs. The visits could not, however, be said to have been a success. Magnolia always came prepared to be the fond and dutiful daughter. Invariably she left seething between humorous rage and angry laughter.

“It wasn’t anything she actually did,” she would explain afterward, ruefully, to Ravenal. “It’s just that she treats me with such disrespect.” She pondered this a moment. “I honestly think Mama’s the vainest woman I have ever met.”

Strangely enough, Kim and her grandmother did not get on very satisfactorily, either. It dawned on Magnolia that the two were much alike. Their methods were different, but the result was the same. Each was possessed of an iron determination; boundless vitality; enormous resistance; canny foresight; definite ambition. Parthy was the blustering sort; Kim the quietly stubborn. When the two met in opposition they stood braced, horn to horn, like bulls.

On both occasions these visits had terminated abruptly in less than a week. The bare, wind-swept little town, winter-locked, had seemed unspeakably dreary to Magnolia. In the chill parlour of the cottage there was a wooden portrait of her father done in crayon. It was an enlargement which Parthy had had done from a small photograph of Andy in his blue coat and visored cap and baggy wrinkled pants. An atrocious thing, but the artist, clumsy though he was, had somehow happened to catch the alert and fun-loving brightness of the keen brown eyes. The mutton-chop whiskers looked like tufts of dirty cotton; the cheeks were pink as a chorus girl’s. But the eyes were Andy’s. Magnolia wandered into the parlour to stand before this picture, looking up at it with a smile. She wandered, too, down to the river to gaze at the sluggish yellow flood thick now with ice, but as enthralling as ever to her. She stood on the river bank in her rich furs, a lonely, wind-swept figure, gazing down the river, down the river, and her eyes that had grown so weary with looking always at great gray buildings and grim gray streets and swarming gray crowds now lost their look of strain, of unrepose, as they beheld in the far still distance the lazy Southern wharves, the sleepy Southern bayous—Cairo, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New Orleans—Queenie, Jo, Elly, Schultzy, Andy, Julie, Steve.

She took Kim eagerly to the water’s edge—gave her the river with a sweep of her arm. Kim did not like it.