Part 24

“Listen! Who—or whom—are you interviewing, young man? Me or my mama?”

“She around?”

“No. She’s at the Shaw opening with Ken.”

“Well, then, you’ll do.”

“Just for that I think I’ll turn elegant on you and not grant any more interviews. Maude Adams never did. Look at Mrs. Fiske! And Duse. Anyway, interviews always sound so dumb when they appear in print. Dignified silence is the thing. Mystery. Everybody knows too much about the stage, nowadays.”

“Believe me, _I_ do!” said the young second-assistant dramatic critic, in a tone of intense acerbity.

A neat little triple tap at the dressing-room door. “Curtain already!” exclaimed Kim in a kind of panic. You would have thought this was her first stage summons. Another hasty application with the rabbit’s foot.

A mulatto girl in black silk so crisp, and white batiste cap and apron so correct that she might have doubled as stage and practical maid, now opened the door outside which she had been discreetly stationed. “Curtain, Blanche?”

“Half a minute more, Miss Ravenal. Telegram.” She handed a yellow envelope to Kim.

As Kim read it there settled over her face the rigidity of shock, so plain that the second-assistant dramatic critic almost was guilty of, “No bad news, I hope?” But as though he had said it Kim Ravenal handed him the slip of paper.

“They’ve misspelled it,” she said, irrelevantly. “It ought to be Parthenia.”

He read:

Mrs. Parthna A. Hawks died suddenly eight o’clock before evening show Cotton Blossom playing Cold Spring Tennessee advise sympathy company.

Chas. K. Barnato.

“Hawks?”

“My grandmother.”

“I’m sorry.” Lamely. “Is there anything——”

“I haven’t seen her in years. She was very old—over eighty. I can’t quite realize. She was famous on the rivers. A sort of legendary figure. She owned and managed the _Cotton Blossom_. There was a curious kind of feud between her and Mother and my father. She was really a pretty terrible—I wonder—Mother——”

“Curtain, Miss Ravenal!”

She went swiftly toward the door.

“Can I do anything? Fetch your mother from the theatre?”

“She’ll be back here with Ken after the play. Half an hour. No use——”

He followed her as she went swiftly toward the door from which she made her third-act entrance. “I don’t want to be offensive, Miss Ravenal. But if there’s a story in this—your grandmother, I mean—eighty, you know——”

Over her shoulder, in a whisper, “There is. See Ken.” She stood a moment; seemed to set her whole figure; relaxed it then; vanished. You heard her lovely but synthetic voice as the American wife of the English husband in the opening lines of the third act:

“I’m so sick of soggy British breakfast. Devilled kidneys! Ugh! Who but the English could face food so visceral at nine A. M.!”

She was thinking as she played the third act for the three hundredth time that she must tuck the telegram under a cold cream jar or back of her mirror as soon as she returned to her dressing room. What if Magnolia should take it into her head to leave the Shaw play early and find it there on her dressing table! She must tell her gently. Magnolia never had learned to take telegrams calmly. They always threw her into a panic. Ever since that one about Gaylord Ravenal’s death in San Francisco. Gaylord Ravenal. A lovely name. What a tin-horn sport he must have been. Charming though, probably.

Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain.

She was back in her dressing room, had removed her make-up, was almost dressed when Ken returned with her mother. She had made desperate haste, aided expertly by her maid.

The two entered laughing, talking, bickering good-naturedly. Kim heard her husband’s jejune plangent voice outside her dressing-room door.

“I’m going to tell your daughter on you, Nola! Yes, I am.”

“I don’t care. He started it.”

Kim looked round at them. Why need they be so horribly high-spirited just to-night? It was like comedy relief in a clumsily written play, put in to make the tragedy seem deeper. Still, this news was hardly tragic. Yet her mother might——

For years, now, Kim Ravenal had shielded her mother; protected her; spoiled her, Magnolia said, almost resentfully.

She stood now with her son-in-law in the cruel glare of the dressing-room lights. Her face was animated, almost flushed. Her fine head rose splendidly from the furred frame of her luxurious coat collar. Her breast and throat were firm and creamy above the square-cut décolletage of her black gown. Her brows looked the blacker and more startling for the wing of white that crossed the black of her straight thick hair. There was about this woman past middle age a breath-taking vitality. Her distinguished young son-in-law appeared rather anæmic in contrast.

“How was the play?” Kim asked, possibly in the hope of changing their ebullient mood.

“Nice production,” said Cameron. “Lunt was flawless. Fontanne’s turned just a shade cute on us. She’d better stop that. Shaw, revived, tastes a little mouldy. Westley yelled. Simonson’s sets were—uh—meticulous I think the word is. . . . And I want to inform you, my dear Mrs. C., that your mama has been a very naughty girl.”

This would never do, thought Kim, her mind on the yellow envelope. She put an arm about her mother. “Kiss me and I’ll forgive you,” she said.

“You don’t know what she’s done.”

“Whatever it is——”

“Woollcott started it, anyway,” protested Magnolia Ravenal, lighting her cigarette. “I should think a man who’s dramatic critic of the New York _World_ would have more consideration for the dignity of his——”

Cameron took up the story. “Our seats turned out to be next to his. Nola sat between us. You know how she always clutches somebody’s hand during the emotional scenes.”

“The last time I went to the theatre with Woollcott he said he’d slap my hands hard if I ever again——” put in Magnolia. But Cameron once more interrupted.

“Then in the second act she clutched him instead of me and he slapped her hand——”

“And pinched——”

“And Nola gave him a sharp dig in the stomach, I’m afraid, with her elbow, and there was quite a commotion. Mothers-in-law are a terrible responsibility.”

“Mother _dear_! A first night of a Shaw revival at the National!”

“He started it. And anyway, you’ve brought me up wrong.”

There was about her suddenly a curious effect of weariness. It was as though, until now, she had been acting, and had discarded her rôle. She stood up. “Ken, if you’ll get me a taxi I’ll run along home. I’m tired. You two are going to the Swopes’, aren’t you? That means three o’clock.”

“I’m not going,” said Kim. “Wait a minute, Ken.” She came over to Magnolia. “Mother, I just got a telegram.”

“Mama?” She uttered the word as though she were a little girl.

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

Kim indicated it. “There, Ken. Get it for me, will you? Under the make-up tray.”

“Dead?” Magnolia had not unfolded the yellow slip.

“Yes.”

She read it. She looked up. The last shadow had vanished of that mood in which she had entered ten minutes earlier. She looked, suddenly, sallow and sixty. “Let me see. Tennessee. Trains.”

“But not to-night, Mother!”

“Yes. Ken, there’s something to St. Louis—Memphis—I’m sure. And then from there to-morrow morning.”

“Ken will go with you.”

“No!” sharply. “No!”

She had her way in the end; left that night, and alone, over Kim’s protests and Ken’s. “If I need you, Ken dear, I’ll telegraph. All those people in the troupe, you know. Some of them have been with her for ten years—fifteen.”

All sorts of trains before you reached this remote little town. Little dusty red-plush trains with sociable brakemen and passengers whose clothes and bearing now seemed almost grotesque to the eyes that once had looked upon them without criticism. A long, hard, trying journey. Little towns at which you left this train and waited long hours for the next. Cinder-strewn junctions whose stations were little better than sheds.

Mile after mile the years had receded as New York was left behind. The sandy soil of the South. Little straggling villages. Unpainted weather-stained cabins, black as the faces that peered from their doorways. When Magnolia Ravenal caught the first gleam of April dogwood flashing white in the forest depths as the train bumbled by, her heart gave a great leap. In a curious and dream-like way the years of her life with Ravenal in Chicago, the years following Ravenal’s desertion of her there, the years of Magnolia’s sudden success in New York seemed to fade into unreality; they became unimportant fragmentary interludes. This was her life. She had never left it. They would be there—Julie, and Steve, and Windy, and Doc, and Parthy, and Andy, and Schultzy—somehow, they would be there. They were real. The others were dream people: Mike McDonald, Hankins, Hetty Chilson, all that raffish Chicago crew; the New York group—Kim’s gay, fly, brittle brilliant crowd with which Magnolia had always assumed an ease she did not feel.

She decided, sensibly, that she was tired, a little dazed, even. She had slept scarcely at all the night before. Perhaps this news of her mother’s death had been, after all, more of a shock than she thought. She would not pretend to be grief-stricken. The breach between her and the indomitable old woman had been a thing of many years’ standing, and it had grown wider and wider with the years following that day when, descending upon her daughter in Chicago, Mrs. Hawks had learned that the handsome dashing Gaylord Ravenal had flown. She had been unable to resist her triumphant, “What did I tell you!” It had been the last straw.

She had wondered, vaguely, what sort of conveyance she might hire to carry her to Cold Spring, for she knew no railroad passed through this little river town. But when she descended from the train at this, the last stage but one in her wearisome journey, there was a little group at the red brick station to meet her. A man came toward her (he turned out to be the Chas. K. Barnato of the telegram). He was the general manager and press agent. Doc’s old job, modernized. “How did you know me?” she had asked, and was startled when he replied:

“You look like your ma.” Then, before she could recover from this: “But Elly told me it was you.”

A rather amazing old lady came toward her. She looked like the ancient ruins of a bisque doll. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, her skin parchment, her hat incredible.

“Don’t you remember me, Nollie?” she said. And pouted her withered old lips. Then, as Magnolia stared, bewildered, she had chirped like an annoyed cockatoo, “Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne.”

“But it isn’t possible!” Magnolia had cried.

This had appeared to annoy Miss Chipley afresh. “Why not, I’d like to know! I’ve been back with the _Cotton Blossom_ the last ten years. Your ma advertised in the _Billboard_ for a general utility team. My husband answered the ad, giving his name——”

“Not——?”

“Schultzy? Oh, no, dearie. I buried poor Schultzy in Douglas, Wyoming, twenty-two years ago. Yes, indeed. Clyde!” She wheeled briskly. “Clyde!” The man came forward. He was, perhaps, fifty. Surely twenty years younger than the erstwhile ingénue lead. A sheepish, grizzled man whose mouth looked as if a drawstring had been pulled out of it, leaving it limp and sprawling. “Meet my husband, Mr. Clyde Mellhop. This is Nollie. Mrs. Ravenal, it is, ain’t it? Seems funny, you being married and got a famous daughter and all. Last time I saw you you was just a skinny little girl, dark-complected—— Well, your ma was hoity-toity with me when she seen it was me was the other half of the Mellhop General Utility Team. Wasn’t going to let me stay, would you believe it! Well, she was glad enough to have me, in the end.”

This, Magnolia realized, must be stopped. She met the understanding look of the man Barnato. He nodded. “I guess you must be pretty tuckered out, Mrs. Ravenal. Now, if you’ll just step over to the car there.” He indicated an important-looking closed car that stood at the far end of the station platform.

Gratefully Magnolia moved toward it. She was a little impressed with its appearance. “Your car! That was thoughtful of you. I was wondering how I’d get——”

“No, ma’am. That ain’t mine. I got a little car of my own, but this is your ma’s—that is—well, it’s yours, now, I reckon.” He helped her into the back seat with Elly. He seated himself before the wheel, with Mellhop beside him. He turned to her, solemnly. “I suppose you’d like to go right over to see your—to view the remains. She’s—they’re at Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. I kind of tended to everything, like your son-in-law’s telegram said. I hope everything will suit you. Of course, if you’d like to go over to the hotel first. I took a room for you—best they had. It’s real comfortable. To-morrow morning we take her—we go to Thebes on the ten-fifteen——”

“The hotel!” cried Magnolia. “But I want to sleep on the boat to-night. I want to go back to the boat.”

“It’s a good three-quarters of an hour run from here, even in this car.”

“I know it. But I want to stay on the boat to-night.”

“It’s for you to say, ma’am.”

The main business street of the little town was bustling and prosperous-looking. Where, in her childhood river-town days the farm wagons and buggies had stood hitched at the curb, she now saw rows of automobiles parked, side by side. Five-and-Ten-Cent Stores. Motion Pictures. Piggly-Wiggly. Popular magazines in the drug-store window. She had thought that everything would be the same.

Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. Quite a little throng outside; and within an actual crowd, close-packed. They made way respectfully for Barnato and his party. “What is it?” whispered Magnolia. “What are all these people here for? What has happened?”

“Your ma was quite a famous person in these parts, Mrs. Ravenal. Up and down the rivers and around she was quite a character. I’ve saved the pieces for you in the paper.”

“You don’t mean these people—all these people have come here to see——”

“Yes, ma’am. In state. I hope you don’t object, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to feel I’d done something you wouldn’t like.”

She felt a little faint. “I’d like them to go away now.”

Parthenia Ann Hawks in her best black silk. Her strong black eyebrows punctuated the implacable old face with a kind of surprised resentment. She had not succumbed to the Conqueror without a battle. Magnolia, gazing down upon the stern waxen features, the competent hands crossed in unwilling submission upon her breast, could read the message of revolt that was stamped, even in death, upon that strong and terrible brow. Here! I’m mistress of this craft. You can’t do this to me! I’m Parthenia Ann Hawks! Death? Fiddlesticks and nonsense! For others, perhaps. But not for me.

Presently they were driving swiftly out along the smooth asphalt road 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.