A little tour of the show boat after dinner. Ken, still pale, but refreshed by tea, was moved to exclamations of admiration. Look at that, Kim! Ingenious. Oh, say, we must stay over and see a performance. I’d no idea! And these combination dressing rooms and bedrooms, eh? Well, I’ll be damned!
Elly Chipley was making up in her special dressing room, infinitesimal in size, just off the stage. Her part for to-night was that of a grande dame in black silk-and-lace cap and fichu. The play was The Planter’s Daughter. She had been rather sniffy in her attitude toward the distinguished visitors. They couldn’t patronize her. She applied the rouge to her withered cheeks in little pettish dabs, and leaned critically forward to scrutinize her old mask of a face. What did she see there? Kim wondered, watching her, fascinated.
“Mother tells me you played Juliet, years ago. How marvellous!”
Elly Chipley tossed her head skittishly. “Yes, indeed! Played Juliet, and was known as the Western Favourite. I wasn’t always on a show boat, I promise you.”
“What a thrill—to play Juliet when you were so young! Usually we have to wait until we’re fifty. Tell me, dear Miss La Verne”—elaborately polite, and determined to mollify this old harridan—“tell me, who was your Romeo?”
And then Life laughed at Elly Chipley (Lenore La Verne on the bills) and at Kim Ravenal, and the institution known as the Stage. For Elly Chipley tapped her cheek thoughtfully with her powder puff, and blinked her old eyes, and screwed up her tremulous old mouth, and pondered, and finally shook her head. “My Romeo? Let me see. Let—me—see. Who was my Romeo?”
They must go now. Oh, Nola darling, half a million! It’s too fantastic. Mother, I can’t bear to leave you down in this God-forsaken hole. Flies and Negroes and mud and all this yellow terrible river that you love more than me. Stand up there—high up—where we can see you as long as possible.
The usual crowd was drifting down to the landing as the show-boat lights began to glow. Twilight was coming on. On the landing, up the river bank, sauntering down the road, came the Negroes, and the hangers-on, the farm-hands, the river folk, the curious, the idle, the amusement-hungry. Snatches of song. Feet shuffling upon the wharf boards. A banjo twanging.
They were being taken back to the nearest railroad connection, but not in the Ford that had brought them. They sat luxuriously in the car that had been Parthy’s and that was Magnolia’s now.
“Mother, dearest, you’ll be back in New York in October or November at the latest, won’t you? Promise me. When the boat closes? You will!”