Show Boat (35 page)

“Borrow,” suggested Magnolia.

“On what security?”

“I don’t mean that kind of—I don’t mean businesslike borrowing. I mean borrowing from friends. Friends. All these men——”

“Men! What men?” “The men at the—at the places.” She had always pretended that she did not actually know he came by his livelihood as he did. She never said, “Gamblers’ Alley.” She refused to admit that daily he had disappeared within the narrow slit of lane that was really a Clark Street alley; that he had spent the hours there watching bits of pasteboard for a living. “The men you have known so many years.”

Grimly: “They’ve all been trying to borrow of me.”

“But Mike McDonald. Hankins. Varnell.” She cast pretense aside now. “Thousands. They’ve had thousands of dollars. All the money we brought with us to Chicago. Won’t they give some of it back?”

This he found engaging rather than irritating, as well he might have. He shouted with laughter as he always did at a fresh proof of her almost incredible naïveté. At times such as these he invariably would be impelled to caress her much as one laughs at a child and then fondles it delightedly after it has surprised one with an unexpected and charming trick. He would kiss the back of her neck and then her wide, flexible mouth, and
she would push him away, bewildered and annoyed that this should be his reaction to what she had meant so seriously.

“Nola, you’re priceless! You’re a darling. There’s no one like you.” He went off again into a shout of laughter. “Give it back! McDonald, h’m? There’s an idea for you.”

“How can you act like that when you know how serious it is!”

“Serious! Why, damn it, it’s desperate. I tell you I’ll never have her come here and see us living like this. We’ll get out, first.… Say, Nola, what’s to prevent us getting out, anyway? Chicago’s no good any more. Why not get out of this! I’m sick of this town.”

“We haven’t any money to get out with, for one reason. And Kim’s at school and she’s going to stay there. She’s going to stay there if I have to——”

“Have to what?”

“Ask Mama for the money.” She said this mischievously, troubled though she was. Out he flew into a rage.

“I’ll see her in—— I’ve been in deeper holes than this and managed to crawl out.” He sat a moment in silence, staring with unseeing eyes at the shabby sticks of furniture that emphasized the room’s dreariness. Magnolia, seated as quietly opposite him, sewing on a petticoat for Kim, suddenly let her hands sink in her lap. She realized, with a sort of fright, that he was as completely outside the room as though his body had been wafted magically through the window. And for him she, too, had vanished. He was deep in thought.
The mask was off. She sat looking at him. She saw, clearly, the man her mother had so bitterly fought her marrying. The face of this man now in his late thirties was singularly unlined. Perhaps that was what you missed in it. The skin and hair and eyes, the set of the shoulders, the lead of the hand from the wrist, bespoke a virile man. But vigour—vigorous—no, he was not that. This was a fencer, not a fighter. But he had fought for her, years ago. The shambling preacher in the little river town whose name she had forgotten. That simple ignorant soul who preached hell fire and thought that play actors were damned. He had not expected to be knocked down in his own musty little shop. Not much of a victory, that. Gay had opposed that iron woman, her mother. But the soft life since then. Red plush, rich food, Clark Street. Weak. What was it? No lines about the mouth. Why was it weak? Why was it weak now if it had not been twelve years ago? A handsome man. Hard. But you couldn’t be hard and weak at the same time, could you? What was he thinking of so intently? His face was so exposed, so defenceless, as sometimes when she awoke in the early morning and looked at him, asleep. Almost ashamed to look at his face, so naked was it of the customary daytime covering.

Now resolve suddenly tightened it. He stood up. He adjusted the smart and shabby hat at an angle that defied its shabbiness. He reached for the malacca stick. It was nine o’clock in the evening. They had had a frugal and unappetizing meal at a little near-by lunch room. Ravenal had eaten nothing. He had, for
the most part, stared at the dishes with a detached and slightly amused air as though they had been served him by mistake and soon would be apologetically reclaimed by the slovenly waitress who had placed them before him.

She had never been one to say, “Where are you going?” Yet now her face was so moving in its appeal that he answered its unspoken question.

“Cheer up, old girl! I know somebody.”

“Who? Who, Gay?”

“Somebody I’ve done favours for. She owes me a good turn.” He was thinking aloud.

“She?”

“Never mind.”

“She, Gay?”

“Did I say—now never mind, Nola. I’ll do the worrying.”

He was off.

She had become accustomed, through these years, to taking money without question when there was money; to doing without, uncomplainingly, when there was none. They had had to scheme before now, and scurry this way and that, seeking a way out of a tight corner. They had had to borrow as they had often lent. It had all been part of the Clark Street life—the gay, wasteful, lax, improvident sporting life of a crude new Mid-west city. But that life was vanishing now. That city was vanishing with it. In its place a newer, harder, more sophisticated metropolis was rearing its ambitious head.

Magnolia, inured to money crises, realized that the
situation to-night was different. This was not a crisis. It was an impasse.

“Let’s get out of here,” Gay had said. There was no way out. The men from whom he had borrowed in the past were themselves as harried as he. The sources from which he had gained his precarious livelihood were drying up; had almost ceased to exist, except furtively. I know somebody. Somebody who would like to do me a favour. Some body—who—would—like—— A horrid suspicion darted through her mind, released from the subconscious. Appalled at its ugliness, she tried to send it back to its hiding place. It would not go. It stayed there before her mind’s eye, grinning, evil, unspeakably repulsive. She took up her sewing again. She endeavoured to fix her mind on Kim. Kim asleep in the cold calm quiet of the great walled convent on South Wabash. French and embroidery and deportment and china painting and wimples and black wings and long dark shining halls and round white faces and slim white tapers and statues of the saints that turned into fauns and why was that not surprising? A clatter. One of the saints had dropped her rosary on the bare shining floor. It wasn’t a rosary. It was an anchor ringing against the metal stanchion of the
Cotton Blossom
.

Magnolia awoke. Her sewing scissors had fallen from her lap. Her face felt stiff and drawn. She hugged herself a little, and shivered, and looked about her. Her little gold watch on the dresser—no, of course not. That was gone. She folded her sewing. It was late, she knew. She was accustomed to being up until twelve, one, two. But this was later. Something told
her that this was later. The black hush of the city outside. The feel of the room in which she sat. The sinister quiet of the very walls about her. The cheap clock on the shelf had stopped. The hands said twenty minutes after two. Twenty-one minutes after, she told herself in a foolish triumph of precision.

She took down her fine long black hair. Brushed it. Plaited it. One of the lacy nightgowns so absurd in the sordid shabbiness of the rooming-house bedroom; so alien to the coarse gray sheets. She had no other kind. She went to bed. She fell asleep.

It was just before dawn when he returned. The black of the window panes showed the promise of gray. His step had an unaccustomed sound. He fumbled for the gas jet. His very presence was strange in the dark. The light flared blue, but she knew; she knew even before it illumined his face that bore queer slack lines she had never before seen there. For the first time in their life together Gaylord Ravenal was drunk.

She sat up; reached for her wrapper at the foot of the bed and bunched it about her shivering shoulders. He was immensely serious and dignified. He swayed a little. The slack look on his face. That was all.

“I’ll do the worrying,” he said, as though continuing the conversation that had held them at nine o’clock. He placed the malacca stick carefully in its corner. He removed his coat, keeping his hat on. The effect was startlingly rowdy, perhaps because he had always so meticulously observed the niceties. Standing thus, weaving back and forth ever so slightly, he pulled from his left vest pocket, where it fitted much too snugly, a
plump bill-folder. Custom probably cautioned him to retain this, merely widening its open side to reveal the sheaf of notes within. But his condition, and all that had gone to bring it about, caused him to forego his cunning. With a vague, but successful, gesture, and a little lurch as he stood, he tossed the leather folder to the counterpane. “Coun’ it!” he commanded, very distinctly. “Ten one hun’er’ dollar bills and ten one hun’er’ dollar bills makes twen’y one hun’er’ dollar bills an’ anybody says it doesn’ is a liar. Two thousan’ dollars. Would you kin’ly count ’em, Mrs. Rav’nal? I believe”—with businesslike dignity—“I b’lieve you’ll find that correc’.”

Magnolia Ravenal in her nightgown with her wrapper hunched about her shoulders sat staring at the little leather booklet on the bed. Its gaping mouth mocked her. She did not touch it.

“Two thousand dollars?” she said.

“I b’lieve you’ll fin’ tha’s correc’.” He seemed to be growing less distinct.

“Where did you get this, Gay?”

“Never min’. I’ll do th’ worrying.”

He unbuttoned his vest with some difficulty. Yawned prodigiously, like one who has earned his rest after a good day’s work.

She looked at him. She was like a drawing in French ink—her face so white, her eyes so enormous, her hair so black.

“You got this from Hetty Chilson.”

His collar came off with a crack-snap. He held it in the hand that pointed toward the money. He seemed
offended at something. Not angry, but hurt. “How can you say that, M’nolia! I got one thousan’ from good ol’ Het and not cen’ more. Wha’ do I do then! Marsh up to Sheedy’s and win a thousan’ more at roulette. Ha! That’s a great joke on Sheedy because, look, roulette isn’ my game. Nev’ has been. Faro’s my game. Tha’s a gen’leman’s game, faro. One thousan’ Hetty, and marsh ri’ up … roulette … win … ’nother … Thous …” He lurched to the bed.

He was asleep at once, heavily, deeply, beside her on the bed, his fine long head lolling off the pillow. She knelt in her place and tried to lift the inert figure to a more comfortable position; succeeded, finally, after some tugging. She drew the lumpy coverlet over him. Then she sat as before, hunched in her nightgown and the wrapper, staring at the open wallet with its many leaves. It was dawn now. The room was gray with it. She ought to turn out the gas. She arose. She picked up the wallet. Before extinguishing the light she counted out ten one-hundred-dollar bills from the sheaf within the wallet. One thousand dollars. Her fingers touched the bills gingerly, fastidiously, and a little wrinkle of disgust curled her lip. She placed the bills on the dresser. She folded the leather holder and tucked it, with its remaining contents, under his pillow. He did not waken. She turned out the light then, and coming back to the bedside drew on the slippers that lay on the floor. She got her shirtwaist—a fresh white one with a Gibson tuck—from the drawer, and her skirt and jacket from the hooks covered over with a
protecting length of calico against the wall. She heated a little water, and washed; combed and dressed her hair; put on her clothes, laid her hat on the dresser. Then she sat in the one comfortable chair that the room afforded—a crazy and decayed armchair done in dingy red plush, relic of some past grandeur—and waited. She even slept a little there in the sagging old chair, with the morning light glaring pitilessly in upon her face. When she awoke it must have been nearly noon. A dour day, but she had grown accustomed to the half-lights of the Chicago fogs. She glanced sharply at him. He had not moved. He had not stirred. He looked, somehow, young, helpless, innocent, pathetic. She busied herself in making a cup of coffee as quietly as might be. This might rouse him, but it would make little difference. She knew what she had to do. She drank the hot revivifying liquid in great gulps. Then she put on her jacket, pinned on her hat, took up the bills and placed them neatly in her handbag. She glanced at herself in the mirror.

“My, you’re plain!” she thought, meaninglessly. She went down the dim stairway. The fusty landlady was flapping a gray rag in the outer doorway as her contribution to the grime of the street.

“What’s taking you out so bright and early, Mis’ Ravenal? Business or pleasure?” She liked her little joke.

“Business,” said Magnolia.

T
HE knell had sounded for the red brick house with the lions guarding its portals. The Chicago soot hung like a pall over it. The front steps sagged. Even the stone lions had a mangy look. The lemon-water sunshine of a Chicago winter day despoiled the dwelling of any sinister exterior aspect. That light, filtering through the lake mist, gave to the house-front the look of a pock-marked, wrinkled, and evil old hag who squats in the market place with her face to the sun and thinks of her purple past and does not regret it. It was half-past one. Magnolia Ravenal had figured this out nicely. That part of Clark Street would be astir by now. As she approached the house on Clark, near Polk, her courage had momentarily failed her, and she had passed it, hurriedly. She had walked a block south, wretchedly. But the feel of the bills in her bag gave her new resolve. She opened the handbag to look at them, turned and walked swiftly back to the house. She rang the bell this time, firmly, demandingly; stood looking down at its clean-scrubbed doorstep and tried to ignore the prickling sensation that ran up and down her spine and the weak and trembling feeling in her legs. The people passing by could see her. She was knocking at Hetty Chilson’s notorious door, and the people passing by could see her: Magnolia Ravenal.
Well, what of it! Don’t be silly. She rang again.