“A fine performance!” Magnolia echoed one evening, rather irritably, after she and Kim had returned from the opening of a play in which one of Kim’s friends was featured. “But she doesn’t act. Everything she did and everything she said was right. And I was as carried out of myself as though I were listening to a clock strike. When I go to the theatre I want to care. In the old days maybe they didn’t know so much about tempo and rhythm, but in the audience strong men wept and women fainted——”
“Now listen, Nola darling. One of your old-day gals would last about four seconds on Broadway. I’ve heard about Clara Morris and Mrs. Siddons, and Modjeska, and Bernhardt all my life. If the sentimental old dears were to come back in an all-star revival to-day the intelligent modern theatre-going audience would walk out on them.”
The new-school actresses went in for the smarter teas, eschewed cocktails, visited the art exhibits, had their portraits painted in the new manner, never were seen at night clubs, were glimpsed coming out of Scribner’s with a thick volume of modern biography, used practically no make-up when in mufti, kept their names out of the New York telephone directory, wore flat-heeled shoes and woollen stockings while walking briskly in Central Park, went to Symphony Concerts; were, in short, figures as glamorous and romantic as a pint of milk. Everything they did on the stage was right. Intelligent, well thought out, and right. Watching them, you knew it was right—tempo, tone, mood, character. Right. As right as an engineering blueprint. Your pulses, as you sat in the theatre, were normal.
Usually, their third season, you saw them unwisely lunching too often at the Algonquin Round Table and wise-cracking with the critics there. The fourth they took a bit in that new English comedy just until O’Neill should have finished the play he was doing for them. The fifth they married that little Whatshisname. The sixth they said, mysteriously, that they were Writing.
Kim kept away from the Algonquin, did not attend first nights with Woollcott or Broun, had a full-page Steichen picture in Vanity Fair, and married Kenneth Cameron. She went out rarely. Sunday night dinners, sometimes; or she had people in (ham à la Queenie part of the cold buffet). Her list of Sunday night guests or engagements read like a roster of the New York Telephone Company’s Exchanges. Stuyvesant, Beekman, Bleeker, Murray, Rhinelander, Vanderbilt, Jerome, Wadsworth, Tremont. She learned to say, “It’s just one of those things——” She finished an unfinished sentence with, “I mean——!” and a throwing up of the open palms.
Kenneth Cameron. Her marriage with Kenneth Cameron was successful and happy and very nice. Separate bedrooms and those lovely négligées—velvet with Venetian sleeves and square neckline. Excellent friends. Nothing sordid. Personal liberty and privacy of thought and action—those were the things that made for happiness in marriage. Magnolia wondered, sometimes, but certainly it was not for her to venture opinion. Her own marriage had been no such glittering example of perfection. Yet she wondered, seeing this well-ordered and respectful union, if Kim was not, after all, missing something. Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt? She was wrong, of course. Ken’s manner toward Kim was polite, tender, thoughtful. Kim’s manner toward Ken was polite, tender, thoughtful. Are you free next Thursday, dear? The Paynes are having those Russians. It might be rather interesting. . . . Sorry. Ken’s voice. Soft, light. It was the—well, Magnolia never acknowledged this, even to herself, but it was what she called the male interior decorator’s voice. You heard it a good deal at teas, and at the Algonquin, and in the lobby between the acts on first nights and in those fascinating shops on Madison Avenue where furniture and old glass and brasses and pictures were shown you by slim young men with delicate hands. I mean——! It’s just one of those things.
There was no Mississippi in Kim. Kim was like the Illinois River of Magnolia’s childhood days. Kim’s life flowed tranquilly between gentle green-clad shores, orderly, well regulated, dependable.
“For the land’s sakes, Magnolia Hawks, you sitting out there yet! Here it’s after three and nearly dinner time!” Elly Chipley at the screen door. “And in the blazing sun, too. You need somebody to look after you worse than your ma did.”
Elly was justified, for Magnolia had a headache that night.
Kim and Ken arrived unexpectedly together on June second, clattering up to the boat landing in a scarecrow Ford driven by a stout Negro in khaki pants, puttees, and an army shirt.