“I’ll go somewhere else.”
She got it. Hurried back with it. Into her room again. She had not even locked the door. Five of the six one-hundred-dollar bills lay as she had tossed them on the dresser. A little crazy, certainly. Years, years afterward she actually could relate the fantastic demoniac events of this day that had begun at four in the morning and ended almost twenty hours later. It made a very good story, dramatic, humorous, tragic. Kim’s crowd thought it was wonderful.
She took off her veil and hat and jacket. Her black hair lay in loose limp ugly loops about her face. She opened one of the sheets of music—Whose Black Baby Are You?—and propped it up against the centre section of the old-fashioned dresser. She crossed her knees. Cradled the banjo. One foot tapped the time rhythmically. An hour. Two hours.
A knock at the door. The landlady, twelve hours fustier than she had been that morning. “It ain’t me, Mis’ Ravenal, but Downstairs says she can’t sleep for the noise. She’s that sickly one. She says she pounded but you didn’t——”
“I’ll stop. I didn’t hear her. I’m sorry.”
“For me you could go on all night.” The landlady leaned bulkily and sociably against the door. “I’m crazy about music. I never knew you was musical.”
“Oh, yes,” said Magnolia. “Very.”
XVIII
“I was educated,” began Kim Ravenal, studying her reflection in the mirror, and deftly placing a dab of rouge on either ear lobe, “in Chicago, by the dear Sisters there in St. Agatha’s Convent.”
She then had the grace to snigger, knowing well what the young second-assistant dramatic critic would say to that. She was being interviewed in her dressing room at the Booth between the second and third acts of Needles and Pins. She had opened in this English comedy in October. Now it was April. Her play before this had run a year. Her play before that had run two years. Her play—well, there was nothing new to be said in an interview with Kim Ravenal, no matter how young or how dramatic the interviewer. There was, therefore, a touch of mischievous malice in this trite statement of hers. She knew what the bright young man would say in protest.