But full steam ahead was impossible for long in a snag-infes

[Cover Illustration]

=_SHOW BOAT_=

=BY=

=_EDNA FERBER_=

=AUTHOR OF=

=“SO BIG,” Etc.=

=[Illustration]=

=_GROSSET & DUNLAP_=

=PUBLISHERS NEW YORK=

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY EDNA FERBER.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN

THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY

LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

=To=

=Winthrop Ames=

=Who First Said Show Boat=

=to Me=

INTRODUCTION

“Show Boat” is neither history nor biography, but fiction. This

statement is made in the hope that it will forestall such protest as may

be registered by demon statisticians against certain liberties taken

with characters, places, and events. In the Chicago portion of the book,

for example, a character occasionally appears some three or four years

after the actual date of his death. Now and then a restaurant or

gambling resort is described as running full blast at a time when it had

vanished at the frown of civic virtue. This, then, was done, not through

negligence in research, but because, in the attempt to give a picture of

the time, it was necessary slightly to condense a period of fifteen or

twenty years.

E. F.

_SHOW BOAT_

I

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was

thankful it had been no worse. She knew whereof she spoke, for it was

literally by a breath that she had escaped being called Mississippi.

“Imagine Mississippi Ravenal!” she often said, in later years. “They’d

have cut it to Missy, I suppose, or even Sippy, if you can bear to think

of anything so horrible. And then I’d have had to change my name or give

up the stage altogether. Because who’d go to see—seriously, I mean—an

actress named Sippy? It sounds half-witted, for some reason. Kim’s bad

enough, God knows.”

And as Kim Ravenal you doubtless are familiar with her. It is no secret

that the absurd monosyllable which comprises her given name is made up

of the first letters of three states—Kentucky, Illinois, and

Missouri—in all of which she was, incredibly enough, born—if she can

be said to have been born in any state at all. Her mother insists that

she wasn’t. If you were an habitué of old South Clark Street in

Chicago’s naughty ’90s you may even remember her mother, Magnolia

Ravenal, as Nola Ravenal, soubrette—though Nola Ravenal never achieved

the doubtful distinction of cigarette pictures. In a day when the stage

measured feminine pulchritude in terms of hips, thighs, and calves, she

was considered much too thin for beauty, let alone for tights.

It had been this Magnolia Ravenal’s respiratory lack that had saved the

new-born girl from being cursed through life with a name boasting more

quadruple vowels and consonants than any other in the language. She had

meant to call the child Mississippi after the tawny untamed river on

which she had spent so much of her girlhood, and which had stirred and

fascinated her always. Her accouchement had been an ordeal even more

terrifying than is ordinarily the case, for Kim Ravenal had actually

been born on the raging turgid bosom of the Mississippi River itself,

when that rampageous stream was flooding its banks and inundating towns

for miles around, at five o’clock of a storm-racked April morning in

1889. It was at a point just below Cairo, Illinois; that region known as

Little Egypt, where the yellow waters of the Mississippi and the

olive-green waters of the Ohio so disdainfully meet and refuse, with

bull-necked pride, to mingle.

From her cabin window on the second deck of the Cotton Blossom Floating

Palace Theatre, Magnolia Ravenal could have seen the misty shores of

three states—if any earthly shores had interested her at the moment.

Just here was Illinois, to whose crumbling clay banks the show boat was

so perilously pinioned. Beyond, almost hidden by the rain veil, was

Missouri; and there, Kentucky. But Magnolia Ravenal lay with her eyes

shut because the effort of lifting her lids was beyond her. Seeing her,

you would have said that if any shores filled her vision at the moment

they were heavenly ones, and those dangerously near. So white, so limp,

so spent was she that her face on the pillow was startlingly like one of

the waxen blossoms whose name she bore. Her slimness made almost no

outline beneath the bedclothes. The coverlet was drawn up to her chin.

There was only the white flower on the pillow, its petals closed.

Outside, the redundant rain added its unwelcome measure to the swollen

and angry stream. In the ghostly gray dawn the grotesque wreckage of

flood-time floated and whirled and jiggled by, seeming to bob a mad

obeisance as it passed the show boat which, in its turn, made stately

bows from its moorings. There drifted past, in fantastic parade, great

trees, uprooted and clutching at the water with stiff dead arms; logs,

catapulted with terrific force; animal carcasses dreadful in their

passivity; chicken coops; rafts; a piano, its ivory mouth fixed in a

death grin; a two-room cabin, upright, and moving in a minuet of stately

and ponderous swoops and advances and chassés; fence rails; an armchair

whose white crocheted antimacassar stared in prim disapproval at the

wild antics of its fellow voyagers; a live sheep, bleating as it came,

but soon still; a bed with its covers, by some freak of suction, still

snugly tucked in as when its erstwhile occupant had fled from it in

fright—all these, and more, contributed to the weird terror of the

morning. The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious,

bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel

claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp

land, houses, trees, cattle—humans, even; and roaring, snarling,

howling hideously as it did so.

Inside Magnolia Ravenal’s cabin all was snug and warm and bright. A wood

fire snapped and crackled cosily in the little pot-bellied iron stove.

Over it bent a veritable Sairey Gamp stirring something hot and savoury

in a saucepan. She stirred noisily, and talked as she stirred, and

glanced from time to time at the mute white figure in the bed. Her own

bulky figure was made more ponderous by layer on layer of ill-assorted

garments of the kind donned from time to time as night wears on by one

who, having been aroused hastily and in emergency, has arrived scantily

clad. A gray flannel nightgown probably formed the basis of this

costume, for its grizzled cuffs could just be seen emerging from the

man’s coat whose sleeves she wore turned back from the wrists for

comfort and convenience. This coat was of box-cut, double-breasted, blue

with brass buttons and gold braid, of the sort that river captains wear.

It gave her a racy and nautical look absurdly at variance with her bulk

and occupation. Peeping beneath and above and around this, the baffled

eye could just glimpse oddments and elegancies such as a red flannel

dressing gown; a flower-besprigged challis sacque whose frill of

doubtful lace made the captain’s coat even more incongruous; a brown

cashmere skirt, very bustled and bunchy; a pair of scuffed tan kid

bedroom slippers (men’s) of the sort known as romeos. This lady’s back

hair was twisted into a knob strictly utilitarian; her front hair

bristled with the wired ends of kid curlers assumed, doubtless, the

evening before the hasty summons. Her face and head were long and

horse-like, at variance with her bulk. This, you sensed immediately, was

a person possessed of enormous energy, determination, and the gift of

making exquisitely uncomfortable any one who happened to be within

hearing radius. She was the sort who rattles anything that can be

rattled; slams anything that can be slammed; bumps anything that can be

bumped. Her name, by some miracle of fitness, was Parthenia Ann Hawks;

wife of Andy Hawks, captain and owner of the Cotton Blossom Floating

Palace Theatre; and mother of this Magnolia Ravenal who, having just

been delivered of a daughter, lay supine in her bed.

Now, as Mrs. Hawks stirred the mess over which she was bending, her

spoon regularly scraped the bottom of the pan with a rasping sound that

would have tortured any nerves but her own iron-encased set. She removed

the spoon, freeing it of clinging drops by rapping it smartly and

metallically against the rim of the basin. Magnolia Ravenal’s eyelids

fluttered ever so slightly.

“Now then!” spake Parthy Ann Hawks, briskly, in that commanding tone

against which even the most spiritless instinctively rebelled, “Now

then, young lady, want it or not, you’ll eat some of this broth, good

and hot and stren’th’ning, and maybe you won’t look so much like a wet

dish rag.” Pan in one hand, spoon in the other, she advanced toward the

bed with a tread that jarred the furniture and set the dainty dimity

window curtains to fluttering. She brought up against the side of the

bed with a bump. A shadow of pain flitted across the white face on the

pillow. The eyes still were closed. As the smell of the hot liquid

reached her nostrils, the lips of the girl on the bed curled in

distaste. “Here, I’ll just spoon it right up to you out of the pan, so’s

it’ll be good and hot. Open your mouth! Open your eyes! I say open——

Well, for land’s sakes, how do you expect a body to do anything for you

if you——”

With a motion shocking in its swift unexpectedness Magnolia Ravenal’s

hand emerged from beneath the coverlet, dashed aside the spoon with its

steaming contents, and sent it clattering to the floor. Then her hand

stole beneath the coverlet again and with a little relaxed sigh of

satisfaction she lay passive as before. She had not opened her eyes. She

was smiling ever so slightly.

“That’s right! Act like a wildcat just because I try to get you to sup

up a little soup that Jo’s been hours cooking, and two pounds of good

mutton in it if there’s an ounce, besides vegetables and barley, and

your pa practically risked his life getting the meat down at Cairo and

the water going up by the foot every hour. No, you’re not satisfied to

get us caught here in the flood, and how we’ll ever get out alive or

dead, God knows, and me and everybody on the boat up all night long with

your goings on so you’d think nobody’d ever had a baby before. Time I

had you there wasn’t a whimper out of me. Not a whimper. I’d have died,

first. I never saw anything as indelicate as the way you carried on, and

your own husband in the room.” Here Magnolia conveyed with a flutter of

the lids that this had not been an immaculate conception. “Well, if you

could see yourself now. A drowned rat isn’t the word. Now you take this

broth, my fine lady, or we’ll see who’s——” She paused in this dramatic

threat to blow a cooling breath on a generous spoonful of the steaming

liquid, to sup it up with audible appreciation, and to take another. She

smacked her lips. “Now then, no more of your monkey-shines, Maggie

Hawks!”

No one but her mother had ever called Magnolia Ravenal Maggie Hawks. It

was unthinkable that a name so harsh and unlovely could be applied to

this fragile person. Having picked up the rejected spoon and wiped it on

the lace ruffle of the challis sacque, that terrible termagant grasped

it firmly against surprise in her right hand and, saucepan in left, now

advanced a second time toward the bed. You saw the flower on the pillow

frosted by an icy mask of utter unyieldingness; you caught a word that

sounded like shenanigans from the woman bending over the bed, when the

cabin door opened and two twittering females entered attired in garments

strangely akin to the haphazard costume worn by Mrs. Hawks. The foremost

of these moved in a manner so bustling as to be unmistakably official.

She was at once ponderous, playful, and menacing—this last attribute

due, perhaps, to the rather splendid dark moustache which stamped her

upper lip. In her arms she carried a swaddled bundle under one flannel

flap of which the second female kept peering and uttering strange

clucking sounds and words that resembled izzer and yesseris.

“Fine a gal’s I ever see!” exclaimed the bustling one. She approached

the bed with the bundle. “Mis’ Means says the same and so”—she glanced

contemptuously over her shoulder at a pale and haggard young man,

bearded but boyish, who followed close behind them—“does the doctor.”

She paused before the word doctor so that the title, when finally it was

uttered, carried with it a poisonous derision. This mysterious sally

earned a little snigger from Mis’ Means and a baleful snort from Mrs.

Hawks. Flushed with success, the lady with the swaddled bundle

(unmistakably a midwife and, like all her craft, royally accustomed to

homage and applause) waxed more malicious. “Fact is, he says only a

minute ago, he never brought a finer baby that he can remember.”

At this the sniggers and snorts became unmistakable guffaws. The wan

young man became a flushed young man. He fumbled awkwardly with the

professionally massive watch chain that so unnecessarily guarded his

cheap nickel blob of a watch. He glanced at the flower-like face on the

pillow. Its aloofness, its remoteness from the three frowzy females that

hovered about it, seemed to lend him a momentary dignity and courage. He

thrust his hands behind the tails of his Prince Albert coat and strode

toward the bed. A wave of the hand, a slight shove with the shoulder,

dismissed the three as nuisances. “One moment, my good woman. . . . _If_

you please, Mrs. Hawks. . . . Kindly don’t jiggle . . .”

The midwife stepped aside with the bundle. Mrs. Hawks fell back a step,

the ineffectual spoon and saucepan in her hands. Mis’ Means ceased to

cluck and to lean on the bed’s footboard. From a capacious inner coat

pocket he produced a stethoscope, applied it, listened, straightened.

From the waistcoat pocket came the timepiece, telltale of his youth and

impecuniosity. He extracted his patient’s limp wrist from beneath the

coverlet and held it in his own strong spatulate fingers—the fingers of

the son of a farmer.

“H’m! Fine!” he exclaimed. “Splendid!”

An unmistakable sniff from the midwife. The boy’s florid manner dropped

from him. He cringed a little. The sensitive hand he still held in his

great grasp seemed to feel this change in him, though Magnolia Ravenal

had not opened her eyes even at the entrance of the three. Her wrist

slid itself out of his hold and down until her fingers met his and

pressed them lightly, reassuringly. The youth looked down, startled.

Magnolia Ravenal, white-lipped, was smiling her wide gay gorgeous smile

that melted the very vitals of you. It was a smile at once poignant and

brilliant. It showed her gums a little, and softened the planes of her

high cheek-bones, and subdued the angles of the too-prominent jaw. A

comradely smile, an understanding and warming one. Strange that this

woman on the bed, so lately torn and racked with the agonies of

childbirth, should be the one to encourage the man whose clumsy

ministrations had so nearly cost her her life. That she could smile at

all was sheer triumph of the spirit over the flesh. And that she could

smile in sympathy for and encouragement of this bungling inexpert young

medico was incredible. But that was Magnolia Ravenal. Properly directed

and managed, her smile, in later years, could have won her a fortune.

But direction and management were as futile when applied to her as to

the great untamed Mississippi that even now was flouting man-built

barriers; laughing at levees that said so far and no farther; jeering at

jetties that said do thus-and-so; for that matter, roaring this very

moment in derision of Magnolia Ravenal herself, and her puny pangs and

her mortal plans; and her father Captain Andy Hawks, and her mother

Parthenia Ann Hawks, and her husband Gaylord Ravenal, and the whole

troupe of the show boat, and the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre

itself, now bobbing about like a cork on the yellow flood that tugged

and sucked and tore at its moorings.

Two tantrums of nature had been responsible for the present precarious

position of the show boat and its occupants. The Mississippi had

furnished one; Magnolia Ravenal the other. Or perhaps it might be fairer

to fix the blame, not on nature, but on human stupidity that had failed

to take into account its vagaries.

Certainly Captain Andy Hawks should have known better, after thirty-five

years of experience on keelboats, steamboats, packets, and show boats up

and down the great Mississippi and her tributaries (the Indians might

call this stream the Father of Waters but your riverman respectfully

used the feminine pronoun). The brand-new show boat had done it. Built

in the St. Louis shipyards, the new _Cotton Blossom_ was to have been

ready for him by February. But February had come and gone, and March as

well. He had meant to be in New Orleans by this time, with his fine new

show boat and his troupe and his band of musicians in their fresh

glittering red-and-gold uniforms, and the marvellous steam calliope that

could be heard for miles up and down the bayous and plantations.

Starting at St. Louis, he had planned a swift trip downstream, playing

just enough towns on the way to make expenses. Then, beginning with

Bayou Teche and pushed by the sturdy steamer _Mollie Able_, they would

proceed grandly upstream, calliope screaming, flags flying, band

tooting, to play every little town and landing and plantation from New

Orleans to Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg; to Memphis, to

Cairo, to St. Louis, up and up to Minnesota itself; then over to the

coal towns on the Monongahela River and the Kanawha, and down again to

New Orleans, following the crops as they ripened—the corn belt, the

cotton belt, the sugar cane; north when the wheat yellowed, following

with the sun the ripening of the peas, the tomatoes, the crabs, the

peaches, the apples; and as the farmer garnered his golden crops so

would shrewd Captain Andy Hawks gather his harvest of gold.

It was April before the new _Cotton Blossom_ was finished and ready to

take to the rivers. Late though it was, when Captain Andy Hawks beheld

her, glittering from texas to keel in white paint with green trimmings,

and with Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre done in letters two feet

high on her upper deck, he was vain enough, or foolhardy enough, or

both, to resolve to stand by his original plan. A little nervous fussy

man, Andy Hawks, with a horrible habit of clawing and scratching from

side to side, when aroused or when deep in thought, at the little

mutton-chop whiskers that sprang out like twin brushes just below his

leather-visored white canvas cap, always a trifle too large for his

head, so that it settled down over his ears. A capering figure, in light

linen pants very wrinkled and baggy, and a blue coat, double-breasted;

with a darting manner, bright brown eyes, and a trick of talking very

fast as he clawed the mutton-chop whiskers first this side, then that,

with one brown hairy little hand. There was about him something

grotesque, something simian. He beheld the new _Cotton Blossom_ as a

bridegroom gazes upon a bride, and frenziedly clawing his whiskers he

made his unwise decision.

“She won’t high-water this year till June.” He was speaking of that

tawny tigress, the Mississippi; and certainly no one knew her moods

better than he. “Not much snow last winter, north; and no rain to speak

of, yet. Yessir, we’ll just blow down to New Orleans ahead of French’s

_Sensation_”—his bitterest rival in the show-boat business—“and start

to work the bayous. Show him a clean pair of heels up and down the

river.”

So they had started. And because the tigress lay smooth and unruffled

now, with only the currents playing gently below the surface like

muscles beneath the golden yellow skin, they fancied she would remain

complaisant until they had had their way. That was the first mistake.

The second was as unreasoning. Magnolia Ravenal’s child was going to be

a boy. Ma Hawks and the wise married women of the troupe knew the signs.

She felt thus-and-so. She had such-and-such sensations. She was carrying

the child high. Boys always were slower in being born than girls.

Besides, this was a first child, and the first child always is late.

They got together, in mysterious female conclave, and counted on the

fingers of their two hands—August, September, October, November,

December—why, the end of April, the soonest. They’d be safe in New

Orleans by then, with the best of doctors for Magnolia, and she on land

while one of the other women in the company played her parts until she

was strong again—a matter of two or three weeks at most.

No sooner had they started than the rains began. No early April showers,

these, but torrents that blotted out the river banks on either side and

sent the clay tumbling in great cave-ins, down to the water, jaundicing

it afresh where already it seethed an ochreous mass. Day after day,

night after night, the rains came down, melting the Northern ice and

snow, filtering through the land of the Mississippi basin and finding

its way, whether trickle, rivulet, creek, stream, or river, to the great

hungry mother, Mississippi. And she grew swollen, and tossed and flung

her huge limbs about and shrieked in labour even as Magnolia Ravenal was

so soon to do.

Eager for entertainment as the dwellers were along the little Illinois

and Missouri towns, after a long winter of dull routine on farm and in

store and schoolhouse, they came sparsely to the show boat. Posters had

told them of her coming, and the news filtered to the back-country. Town

and village thrilled to the sound of the steam calliope as the Cotton

Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, propelled by the square-cut clucking

old steamer, _Mollie Able_, swept grandly down the river to the landing.

But the back-country roads were impassable bogs by now, and growing

worse with every hour of rain. Wagon wheels sank to the hubs in mud.

There were crude signs, stuck on poles, reading, “No bottom here.” The

dodgers posted on walls and fences in the towns were rain-soaked and

bleary. And as for the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre Ten Piece

Band (which numbered six)—how could it risk ruin of its smart new red

coats, gold-braided and gold-buttoned, by marching up the water-logged

streets of these little towns whose occupants only stared wistfully out

through storm-blurred windows? It was dreary even at night, when the

show boat glowed invitingly with the blaze of a hundred oil lamps that

lighted the auditorium seating six hundred (One Thousand Seats! A

Luxurious Floating Theatre within an Unrivalled Floating Palace!).

Usually the flaming oil-flares on their tall poles stuck in the steep

clay banks that led down to the show boat at the water’s edge made a

path of fiery splendour. Now they hissed and spluttered dismally, almost

extinguished by the deluge. Even when the bill was St. Elmo or East

Lynne, those tried and trusty winners, the announcement of which always

packed the show boat’s auditorium to the very last seat in the balcony

reserved for Negroes, there was now only a damp handful of

shuffle-footed men and giggling girls and a few children in the cheaper

rear seats. The Mississippi Valley dwellers, wise with the terrible

wisdom born of much suffering under the dominance of this voracious and

untamed monster, so ruthless when roused, were preparing against

catastrophe should these days of rain continue.

Captain Andy Hawks clawed his mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that,

and scanned the skies, and searched the yellowing swollen stream with

his bright brown eyes. “We’ll make for Cairo,” he said. “Full steam

ahead. I don’t like the looks of her—the big yella snake.”

But full steam ahead was impossible for long in a snag-infested river,

as Andy Hawks well knew; and in a river whose treacherous channel

shifted almost daily in normal times, and hourly in flood-time.

Cautiously they made for Cairo. Cape Girardeau, Gray’s Point,

Commerce—then, suddenly, near evening, the false sun shone for a brief

hour. At once everyone took heart. The rains, they assured each other,

were over. The spring freshet would subside twice as quickly as it had

risen. Fittingly enough, the play billed for that evening was Tempest

and Sunshine, always a favourite. Magnolia Ravenal cheerfully laced

herself into the cruel steel-stiffened high-busted corset of the period,

and donned the golden curls and the prim ruffles of the part. A goodish

crowd scrambled and slipped and slid down the rain-soaked clay bank,

torch-illumined, to the show boat, their boots leaving a trail of mud

and water up and down the aisles of the theatre and between the seats.

It was a restless audience, and hard to hold. There had been an angry

sunset, and threatening clouds to the northwest. The crowd shuffled its

feet, coughed, stirred constantly. There was in the air something

electric, menacing, heavy. Suddenly, during the last act, the north wind

sprang up with a whistling sound, and the little choppy hard waves could

be heard slapping against the boat’s flat sides. She began to rock, too,

and pitch, flat though she was and securely moored to the river bank.

Lightning, a fusillade of thunder, and then the rain again, heavy, like

drops of molten lead, and driven by the north wind. The crowd scrambled

up the perilous clay banks, slipping, falling, cursing, laughing,

frightened. To this day it is told that the river rose seven feet in

twenty-four hours. Captain Andy Hawks, still clawing his whiskers, still

bent on making for Cairo, cast off and ordered the gangplank in as the

last scurrying villager clawed his way up the slimy incline whose

heights the river was scaling inch by inch.

“The Ohio’s the place,” he insisted, his voice high and squeaky with

excitement. “High water at Cincinnati, St. Louis, Evansville, or even

Paducah don’t have to mean high-water on the Ohio. It’s the old yella

serpent making all this kick-up. But the Ohio’s the river gives Cairo

the real trouble. Yessir! And she don’t flood till June. We’ll make for

the Ohio and stay on her till this comes to a stand, anyway.”

Then followed the bedlam of putting off. Yells, hoarse shouts, bells

ringing, wheels churning the water to foam. Lively now! Cramp her down!

Snatch her! Snatch her!

Faintly, above the storm, you heard the cracked falsetto of little

Captain Andy Hawks, a pilot for years, squeaking to himself in his

nervousness the orders that river etiquette forbade his actually giving

that ruler, that ultimate sovereign, the pilot, old Mark Hooper, whose

real name was no more Mark than Twain’s had been: relic of his leadsmen

days, with the cry of, “Mark three! Mark three! Half twain! Quarter

twain! M-A-R-K twain!” gruffly shouted along the hurricane deck.

It was told, on the rivers, that little Andy Hawks had been known, under

excitement, to walk off the deck into the river and to bob afloat there

until rescued, still spluttering and shrieking orders in a profane

falsetto.

Down the river they went, floating easily over bars that in normal times

stood six feet out of the water; clattering through chutes; shaving the

shores. Thunder, lightning, rain, chaos outside. Within, the orderly

routine of bedtime on the show boat. Mis’ Means, the female half of the

character team, heating over a tiny spirit flame a spoonful of goose

grease which she would later rub on her husband’s meagre cough-racked

chest; Maudie Rainger, of the general business team, sipping her bedtime

cup of coffee; Bert Forbush, utility man, in shirt sleeves, check pants,

and carpet slippers, playing a sleep-inducing game of canfield—all this

on the stage, bare now of scenery and turned into a haphazard and

impromptu lounging room for the members of this floating theatrical

company. Mrs. Hawks, in her fine new cabin on the second deck, off the

gallery, was putting her sparse hair in crimpers as she would do if this

were the night before Judgment Day. Flood, storm, danger—all part of

river show-boat life. Ordinarily, it is true, they did not proceed down

river until daybreak. After the performance, the show boat and its

steamer would stay snug and still alongside the wharf of this little

town or that. By midnight, company and crew would have fallen asleep to

the sound of the water slap-slapping gently against the boat’s sides.

To-night there probably would be little sleep for some of the company,

what with the storm, the motion, the unwonted stir, and the noise that

came from the sturdy _Mollie Able_, bracing her cautious bulk against

the flood’s swift urging; and certainly none for Captain Andy Hawks, for

pilot Mark Hooper and the crew of the _Mollie Able_. But that, too, was

all part of the life.

Midnight had found Gaylord Ravenal, in nightshirt and dressing gown, a

handsome and distraught figure, pounding on the door of his

mother-in-law’s cabin. From the cabin he had just left came harrowing

sounds—whimpers, and little groans, and great moans, like an animal in

agony. Magnolia Ravenal was not one of your silent sufferers. She was

too dramatic for that. Manœuvred magically by the expert Hooper, they

managed to make a perilous landing just above Cairo. The region was

scoured for a doctor, without success, for accident had followed on

flood. Captain Andy had tracked down a stout and reluctant midwife who

consented only after an enormous bribe to make the perilous trip to the

levee, clambering ponderously down the slippery bank with many groanings

and forebodings, and being sustained, both in bulk and spirit, by the

agile and vivacious little captain much as a tiny fussy river tug guides

a gigantic and unwieldy ocean liner. He was almost frantically

distraught, for between Andy Hawks and his daughter Magnolia Ravenal was

that strong bond of affection and mutual understanding that always

exists between the henpecked husband and the harassed offspring of a

shrew such as Parthy Ann Hawks.

When, an hour later, Gaylord Ravenal, rain-soaked and mud-spattered,

arrived with a white-faced young doctor’s assistant whose first

obstetrical call this was, he found the fat midwife already in charge

and inclined to elbow about any young medical upstart who might presume

to dictate to a female of her experience.

It was a sordid and ravaging confinement which, at its climax, teetered

for one dreadful moment between tragedy and broad comedy. For at the

crisis, just before dawn, the fat midwife, busy with ministrations, had

said to the perspiring young doctor, “D’you think it’s time to snuff

her?”

Bewildered, and not daring to show his ignorance, he had replied,

judicially, “Uh—not just yet. No, not just yet.”

Again the woman had said, ten minutes later, “Time to snuff her, I’d

say.”

“Well, perhaps it is.” He watched her, fearfully, wondering what she

might mean; cursing his own lack of knowledge. To his horror and

amazement, before he could stop her, she had stuffed a great pinch of

strong snuff up either nostril of Magnolia Ravenal’s delicate nose. And

thus Kim Ravenal was born into the world on the gust of a series of

convulsive a-CHOOs!

“God almighty, woman!” cried the young medico, in a frenzy. “You’ve

killed her.”

“Run along, do!” retorted the fat midwife, testily, for she was tired by

now, and hungry, and wanted her coffee badly. “H’m! It’s a gal. And they

had their minds all made up to a boy. Never knew it to fail.” She turned

to Magnolia’s mother, a ponderous and unwieldy figure at the foot of the

bed. “Well, now, Mis’—Hawks, ain’t it?—that’s right—Hawks. Well, now,

Mis’ Hawks, we’ll get this young lady washed up and then I’d thank you

for a pot of coffee and some breakfast. I’m partial to a meat

breakfast.”

All this had been a full hour ago. Magnolia Ravenal still lay inert,

unheeding. She had not even looked at her child. Her mother now uttered

bitter complaint to the others in the room.

“Won’t touch a drop of this good nourishing broth. Knocked the spoon

right out of my hand, would you believe it! for all she lays there

looking so gone. Well! I’m going to open her mouth and pour it down.”

The young doctor raised a protesting palm. “No, no, I wouldn’t do that.”

He bent over the white face on the pillow. “Just a spoonful,” he coaxed,

softly. “Just a swallow?”

She did not vouchsafe him another smile. He glanced at the irate woman

with the saucepan; at the two attendant vestals. “Isn’t there

somebody——?”

The men of the company and the crew were out, he well knew, with pike

poles in hand, working to keep the drifting objects clear of the boats.

Gaylord Ravenal would be with them. He had been in and out a score of

times through the night, his handsome young face (too handsome, the

awkward young doctor had privately decided) twisted with horror and pity

and self-reproach. He had noticed, too, that the girl’s cries had abated

not a whit when the husband was there. But when he took her writhing

fingers, and put one hand on her wet forehead, and said, in a voice that

broke with agony, “Oh, Nola! Nola! Don’t. I didn’t know it was like

. . . Not like this. . . . Magnolia . . .”—she had said, through

clenched teeth and white lips, surprisingly enough, with a knowledge

handed down to her through centuries of women writhing in childbirth,

“It’s all right, Gay. . . . Always . . . like this . . . damn it. . . .

Don’t you worry. . . . It’s . . . all . . .” And the harassed young

doctor had then seen for the first time the wonder of Magnolia Ravenal’s

poignant smile.

So now when he said, shyly, “Isn’t there somebody else——” he was

thinking that if the young and handsome husband could be spared for but

a moment from his pike pole it would be better to chance a drifting log

sent crashing against the side of the boat by the flood than that this

white still figure on the bed should be allowed to grow one whit whiter

or more still.

“Somebody else’s fiddlesticks!” exploded Mrs. Hawks, inelegantly. They

were all terribly rude to him, poor lad, except the one who might have

felt justified in being so. “If her own mother can’t——” She had

reheated the broth on the little iron stove, and now made a third

advance, armed with spoon and saucepan. The midwife had put the swaddled

bundle on the pillow so that it lay just beside Magnolia Ravenal’s arm.

It was she who now interrupted Mrs. Hawks, and abetted her.

“How in time d’you expect to nurse,” she demanded, “if you don’t eat!”

Magnolia Ravenal didn’t know and, seemingly, didn’t care.

A crisis was imminent. It was the moment for drama. And it was

furnished, obligingly enough, by the opening of the door to admit the

two whom Magnolia Ravenal loved in all the world. There came first the

handsome, haggard Gaylord Ravenal, actually managing, in some incredible

way, to appear elegant, well-dressed, dapper, at a time, under

circumstances, and in a costume which would have rendered most men

unsightly, if not repulsive. But his gifts were many, and not the least

of them was the trick of appearing sartorially and tonsorially flawless

when dishevelment and a stubble were inevitable in any other male. Close

behind him trotted Andy Hawks, just as he had been twenty-four hours

before—wrinkled linen pants, double-breasted blue coat, oversize

visored cap, mutton-chop whiskers and all. Together he and Ma Hawks, in

her blue brass-buttoned coat that was a twin of his, managed to give the

gathering quite a military aspect. Certainly Mrs. Hawks’ manner was

martial enough at the moment. She raised her voice now in complaint.

“Won’t touch her broth. Ain’t half as sick as she lets on or she

wouldn’t be so stubborn. Wouldn’t have the strength to be, ’s what I

say.”

Gaylord Ravenal took from her the saucepan and the spoon. The saucepan

he returned to the stove. He espied a cup on the washstand; with a

glance at Captain Andy he pointed silently to this. Andy Hawks emptied

its contents into the slop jar, rinsed it carefully, and half filled it

with the steaming hot broth. The two men approached the bedside. There

was about both a clumsy and touching but magically effective tenderness.

Gay Ravenal slipped his left arm under the girl’s head with its hair all

spread so dank and wild on the pillow. Captain Andy Hawks leaned

forward, cup in hand, holding it close to her mouth. With his right

hand, delicately, Gay Ravenal brought the first hot revivifying spoonful

to her mouth and let it trickle slowly, drop by drop, through her lips.

He spoke to her as he did this, but softly, softly, so that the others

could not hear the words. Only the cadence of his voice, and that was a

caress. Another spoonful, and another, and another. He lowered her again

to the pillow, his arm still under her head. A faint tinge of palest

pink showed under the waxen skin. She opened her eyes; looked up at him.

She adored him. Her pain-dulled eyes even then said so. Her lips moved.

He bent closer. She was smiling almost mischievously.

“Fooled them.”

“What’s she say?” rasped Mrs. Hawks, fearfully, for she loved the girl.

Over his shoulder he repeated the two words she had whispered.

“Oh,” said Parthy Ann Hawks, and laughed. “She means fooled ’em because

it’s a girl instead of a boy.”

But at that Magnolia Ravenal shook her head ever so slightly, and looked

up at him again and held up one slim forefinger and turned her eyes

toward the corners with a listening look. And in obedience he held up

his hand then, a warning for silence, though he was as mystified as

they. And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and

crash of the great river whose flood had caught them and shaken them and

brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time. And now he knew what

she meant. She wasn’t thinking of the child that lay against her arms.

Her lips moved again. He bent closer. And what she said was:

“The River.”

II

Surely no little girl had ever had a more fantastic little girlhood than

this Magnolia Ravenal who had been Magnolia Hawks. By the time she was

eight she had fallen into and been fished out of practically every river

in the Mississippi Basin from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota. The

ordinary routine of her life, in childhood, had been made up of doing

those things that usually are strictly forbidden the average child. She

swam muddy streams; stayed up until midnight; read the lurid

yellow-backed novels found in the cabins of the women of the company;

went to school but rarely; caught catfish; drank river water out of the

river itself; roamed the streets of strange towns alone; learned to

strut and shuffle and buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces

dotted the boards of the Southern wharves as thickly as grace notes

sprinkle a bar of lively music. And all this despite constant

watchfulness, nagging, and admonition from her spinster-like mother; for

Parthy Ann Hawks, matron though she was, still was one of those women

who, confined as favourite wife in the harem of a lascivious Turk, would

have remained a spinster at heart and in manner. And though she lived on

her husband’s show boat season after season, and tried to rule it from

pilot house to cook’s galley, she was always an incongruous figure in

the gay, careless vagabond life of this band of floating players. The

very fact of her presence on the boat was a paradox. Life, for Parthy

Ann Hawks, was meant to be made up of crisp white dimity curtains at

kitchen windows; of bi-weekly bread bakings; of Sunday morning service

and Wednesday night prayer meeting; of small gossip rolled evilly under

the tongue. The male biped, to her, was a two-footed animal who tracked

up a clean kitchen floor just after it was scoured and smoked a pipe in

defiance of decency. Yet here she was—and had been for ten

years—leading an existence which would have made that of the Stratford

strollers seem orderly and prim by comparison.

She had been a Massachusetts school teacher, living with a henpecked

fisherman father, and keeping house expertly for him with one hand while

she taught school with the other. The villagers held her up as an

example of all the feminine virtues, but the young males of the village

were to be seen walking home from church with this or that plump

twitterer who might be a notoriously bad cook but who had an undeniable

way of tying a blue sash about a tempting waist. Parthenia Ann, prayer

book clasped in mitted hands, walked sedately home with her father. The

vivacious little Andy Hawks, drifting up into Massachusetts one summer,

on a visit to fishermen kin, had encountered the father, and, through

him, the daughter. He had eaten her light flaky biscuit, her

golden-brown fries; her ruddy jell; her succulent pickles; her juicy

pies. He had stood in her kitchen doorway, shyly yet boldly watching her

as she moved briskly from table to stove, from stove to pantry. The

sleeves of her crisp print dress were rolled to the elbow, and if those

elbows were not dimpled they were undeniably expert in batter-beating,

dough-kneading, pan-scouring. Her sallow cheeks were usually a little

flushed with the heat of the kitchen and the energy of her movements,

and, perhaps, with the consciousness of the unaccustomed masculine eye

so warmly turned upon her. She looked her bustling best, and to little

impulsive warm-hearted Andy she represented all he had ever known and

dreamed, in his roving life, of order, womanliness, comfort. She was

some years older than he. The intolerance with which women of Parthenia

Ann’s type regard all men was heightened by this fact to something

resembling contempt. Even before their marriage, she bossed him about

much as she did her old father, but while she nagged she also fed them

toothsome viands, and the balm of bland, well-cooked food counteracted

the acid of her words. Then, too, Nature, the old witch-wanton, had set

the yeast to working in the flabby dough of Parthy Ann’s organism. Andy

told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through

his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the

vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and

certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his

impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. The first time he kissed this tall,

raw-boned New England woman he was startled at the robustness with which

she met and returned the caress. They were married and went to Illinois

to live in the little town of Thebes, on the Mississippi. In the village

from which she had married it was said that, after she left, her old

father, naturally neat and trained through years of nagging to

super-neatness, indulged in an orgy of disorder that lasted days. As

other men turn to strong drink in time of exuberance or relief from

strain, so the tidy old septuagenarian strewed the kitchen with dirty

dishes and scummy pots and pans; slept for a week in an unmade bed;

padded in stocking feet; chewed tobacco and spat where he pleased;

smoked the lace curtains brown; was even reported by a spying neighbour

to have been seen seated at the reedy old cottage organ whose palsied

pipes had always quavered to hymn tunes, picking out with one gnarled

forefinger the chorus of a bawdy song. He lived one free, blissful year

and died of his own cooking.

As pilot, river captain, and finally, as they thrived, owner and captain

of a steamer accommodating both passengers and freight, Captain Andy was

seldom in a position to be guilty of tracking the white-scoured kitchen

floor or discolouring with pipe smoke the stiff folds of the window

curtains. The prim little Illinois cottage saw him but rarely during the

season when river navigation was at its height. For many months in the

year Parthy Ann Hawks was free to lead the spinsterish existence for

which nature had so evidently planned her. Her window panes glittered,

her linen was immaculate, her floors unsullied. When Captain Andy came

home there was constant friction between them. Sometimes her gay,

capering little husband used to look at this woman as at a stranger.

Perhaps his nervous habit of clawing at his mutton-chop whiskers had

started as a gesture of puzzlement or despair.

The child Magnolia was not born until seven years after their marriage.

That Parthy Ann Hawks could produce actual offspring was a miracle to

give one renewed faith in certain disputed incidents recorded in the New

Testament. The child was all Andy—manner, temperament, colouring.

Between father and daughter there sprang up such a bond of love and

understanding as to make their relation a perfect thing, and so sturdy

as successfully to defy even the destructive forces bent upon it by Mrs.

Hawks. Now the little captain came home whenever it was physically

possible, sacrificing time, sleep, money—everything but the safety of

his boat and its passengers—for a glimpse of the child’s piquant face,

her gay vivacious manner, her smile that wrung you even then.

It was years before Captain Andy could persuade his wife to take a river

trip with him on his steamer down to New Orleans and back again,

bringing the child. It was, of course, only a ruse for having the girl

with him. River captains’ wives were not popular on the steamers their

husbands commanded. And Parthy Ann, from that first trip, proved a

terror. It was due only to tireless threats, pleadings, blandishments,

and actual bribes on the part of Andy that his crew did not mutiny

daily. Half an hour after embarking on that first trip, Parthy Ann poked

her head into the cook’s galley and told him the place was a disgrace.

The cook was a woolly-headed black with a rolling protuberant eye and

the quick temper of his calling.

Furthermore, though a capable craftsman, and in good standing on the

river boats, he had come aboard drunk, according to time-honoured

custom; not drunk to the point of being quarrelsome or incompetent, but

entertaining delusions of grandeur, varied by ominous spells of sullen

silence. In another twelve hours, and for the remainder of the trip, he

would be sober and himself. Captain Andy knew this, understood him, was

satisfied with him.

Now one of his minions was seated on an upturned pail just outside the

door, peeling a great boiler full of potatoes with almost magic celerity

and very little economy.

Parthy Ann’s gimlet eye noted the plump peelings as they fell in long

spirals under the sharp blade. She lost no time.

“Well, I declare! Of all the shameful waste I ever clapped my eyes on,

that’s the worst.”

The black at the stove turned to face her, startled and uncomprehending.

Visitors were not welcome in the cook’s galley. He surveyed without

enthusiasm the lean figure with the long finger pointing accusingly at a

quite innocent pan of potato parings.

“Wha’ that you say, missy?”

“Don’t you missy me!” snapped Parthy Ann Hawks. “And what I said was

that I never saw such criminal waste as those potato parings. An inch

thick if they’re a speck, and no decent cook would allow it.”

A simple, ignorant soul, the black man, and a somewhat savage; as mighty

in his small domain as Captain Andy in his larger one. All about him now

were his helpers, black men like himself, with rolling eyes and great

lips all too ready to gash into grins if this hard-visaged female

intruder were to worst him.

“Yo-all passenger on this boat, missy?”

Parthy Ann surveyed disdainfully the galley’s interior, cluttered with

the disorder attendant on the preparation of the noonday meal.

“Passenger! H’mph! No, I’m not. And passenger or no passenger, a

filthier hole I never saw in my born days. I’ll let you know that I

shall make it my business to report this state of things to the Captain.

Good food going to waste——”

A red light seemed to leap then from the big Negro’s eyeballs. His lips

parted in a kind of savage and mirthless grin, so that you saw his great

square gleaming teeth and the blue gums above them. Quick as a panther

he reached down with one great black paw into the pan of parings,

straightened, and threw the mass, wet and slimy as it was, full at her.

The spirals clung and curled about her—on her shoulders, around her

neck, in the folds of her gown, on her head, Medusa-like.

“They’s something for you take to the Captain to show him, missy.”

He turned sombrely back to his stove. The other blacks were little less

grave than he. They sensed something sinister in the fury with which

this garbage-hung figure ran screaming to the upper deck. The scene

above decks must have been a harrowing one.