Negro, thoroughly sobered now, went quite meekly down the gangplank and
up the levee, his carpet bag in hand. In fact, it was said that, when he
had learned it was the Captain’s wife whom he had treated thus, he had
turned a sort of ashen gray and had tried to jump overboard and swim
ashore. The gay little Captain Andy was a prime favourite with his crew.
Shamefaced though the Negro was, there appeared something akin to pity
in the look he turned on Captain Andy as he was put ashore. If that was
true, then the look on the little captain’s face as he regarded the
miscreant was certainly born of an inward and badly concealed
admiration. It was said, too, but never verified, that something round
and gold and gleaming was seen to pass from the Captain’s hairy little
brown hand to the big black paw.
For the remainder of the trip Mrs. Hawks constituted herself a sort of
nightmarish housekeeper, prowling from corridor to cabins, from dining
saloon to pantry. She made life wretched for the pert yellow wenches who
performed the cabin chamber-work. She pounced upon them when they
gathered in little whispering groups, gossiping. Thin-lipped and baleful
of eye, she withered the very words they were about to utter to a waiter
or deck-hand, so that the flowers of coquetry became ashes on their
tongues. She regarded the female passengers with suspicion and the males
with contempt. This was the latter ’70s, and gambling was as much a part
of river-boat life as eating and drinking. Professional gamblers often
infested the boats. It was no uncommon sight to see a poker game that
had started in the saloon in the early evening still in progress when
sunrise reddened the river. It was the day of the flowing moustache, the
broad-brimmed hat, the open-faced collar, and the diamond stud. It
constituted masculine America’s last feeble flicker of the picturesque
before he sank for ever into the drab ashes of uniformity. A Southern
gentleman, particularly, clad thus, took on a dashing and dangerous
aspect. The rakish angle of the hat with its curling brim, the flowing
ends of the string tie, the movement of the slender virile fingers as
they stroked the moustache, all were things to thrill the feminine
beholder. Even that frigid female, Parthenia Ann Hawks, must have known
a little flutter of the senses as she beheld these romantic
and—according to her standards—dissolute passengers seated, silent,
wary, pale, about the gaming table. But in her stern code, that which
thrilled was wicked. She belonged to the tribe of the Knitting Women; of
the Salem Witch Burners; of all fanatics who count nature as an enemy to
be suppressed; and in whose veins the wine of life runs vinegar. If the
deep seepage of Parthy Ann’s mind could have been brought to the
surface, it would have analyzed chemically thus: “I find these men
beautiful, stirring, desirable. But that is an abomination. I must not
admit to myself that I am affected thus. Therefore I think and I say
that they are disgusting, ridiculous, contemptible.”
Her attitude was somewhat complicated by the fact that, as wife of the
steamer’s captain, she was treated with a courtly deference on the part
of these very gentlemen whom she affected to despise; and with a
gracious cordiality by their ladies. The Southern men, especially, gave
an actual effect of plumes on their wide-brimmed soft hats as they bowed
and addressed her in their soft drawling vernacular.
“Well, ma’am, and how are you enjoying your trip on your good husband’s
magnificent boat?” It sounded much richer and more flattering as they
actually said it. “. . . Yo’ trip on yo’ good husband’s
ma-a-a-yg-nif’cent . . .” They gave one the feeling that they were
really garbed in satin, sword, red heels, lace ruffles.
Parthenia Ann, whose stays always seemed, somehow, to support her form
more stiffly than did those of any other female, would regard her
inquirers with a cold and fishy eye.
“The boat’s well enough, I suppose. But what with the carousing by night
and the waste by day, a Christian soul can hardly look on at it without
feeling that some dreadful punishment will overtake us all before we
arrive at the end of our journey.” From her tone you would almost have
gathered that she hoped it.
He of the broad-brimmed hat, and his bustled, basqued alpaca lady, would
perhaps exchange a glance not altogether amused. Collisions, explosions,
snag-founderings were all too common in the river traffic of the day to
risk this deliberate calling down of wrath.
Moving away, the soft-tongued Southern voices would be found to be as
effective in vituperation as in flattery. “Pole cat!” he of the phantom
plumes would say, aside, to his lady.
Fortunately, Parthy Ann’s dour misgivings did not materialize. The trip
downstream proved a delightful one, and as tranquil as might be with
Mrs. Hawks on board. Captain Andy’s steamer, though by no means as large
as some of the so-called floating palaces that plied the Mississippi,
was known for the excellence of its table, the comfort of its
appointments, and the affability of its crew. So now the passengers
endured the irritation of Mrs. Hawks’ presence under the balm of
appetizing food and good-natured service. The crew suffered her nagging
for the sake of the little captain, whom they liked and respected; and
for his wages, which were generous.
Though Parthenia Ann Hawks regarded the great river—if, indeed, she
noticed it at all—merely as a moist highway down which one travelled
with ease to New Orleans; untouched by its mystery, unmoved by its
majesty, unsubdued by its sinister power, she must still, in spite of
herself, have come, however faintly and remotely, under the spell of its
enchantment. For this trip proved, for her, to be the first of many, and
led, finally, to her spending seven months out of the twelve, not only
on the Mississippi, but on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Kanawha, the Big
Sandy. Indeed, her liking for the river life, together with her zeal for
reforming it, became so marked that in time river travellers began to
show a preference for steamers other than Captain Andy’s, excellently
though they fared thereon.
Perhaps the attitude of the lady passengers toward the little captain
and the manner of the little captain as he addressed the lady passengers
did much to feed the flame of Parthy Ann’s belligerence. Until the
coming of Andy Hawks she had found favour in no man’s eyes. Cut in the
very pattern of spinsterhood, she must actually have had moments of
surprise and even incredulity at finding herself a wife and mother. The
art of coquetry was unknown to her; because the soft blandishments of
love had early been denied her she now repudiated them as sinful; did
her hair in a knob; eschewed flounces; assumed a severe demeanour; and
would have been the last to understand that any one of these repressions
was a confession. All about her—and Captain Andy—on the steamship were
captivating females, full of winning wiles; wives of Southern planters;
cream-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, indolent, heavy-lidded,
bewitching; or women folk of prosperous Illinois or Iowa merchants,
lawyers, or manufacturers making a pleasure jaunt of the Southern
business trip with husband or father.
And, “Oh, Captain Hawks!” they said; and, “Oh, Captain Andy! Do come
here like a nice man and tell us what it means when that little bell
rings so fast? . . . And why do they call it the hurricane deck? . . .
Oh, Captain Hawks, is that a serpent tattooed on the back of your hand!
I declare it is! Look, Emmaline! Emmaline, look! This naughty Captain
Andy has a serpent . . .”
Captain Andy’s social deportment toward women was made up of that most
devastating of combinations, a deferential manner together with an
audacious tongue. A tapering white finger, daringly tracing a rosy nail
over the blue coils of the tattooed serpent, would find itself gently
imprisoned beneath the hard little brown paw that was Andy’s free hand.
“After this,” the little captain would say, thoughtfully, “it won’t be
long before that particular tattoo will be entirely worn away. Yes,
ma’am! No more serpent.”
“But why?”
“Erosion, ma’am.”
“E—but I don’t understand. I’m so stupid. I——”
Meltingly, the wicked little monkey, “I’ll be so often kissing the spot
your lovely finger has traced, ma’am.”
“Oh-h-h-h!” A smart tap of rebuke with her palm-leaf fan. “You _are_ a
saucy thing. Emmaline, did you hear what this wicked captain said!”
Much of the freedom that Magnolia enjoyed on this first trip she owed to
her mother’s quivering preoccupation with these vivacious ladies.
If the enchantment of the river had been insidious enough to lure even
Mrs. Hawks, certainly the child Magnolia fell completely under its magic
spell. From that first trip on the Mississippi she was captive in its
coils. Twenty times daily, during that leisurely journey from St. Louis
to New Orleans, Mrs. Hawks dragged her child, squirming and protesting,
from the pilot house perched atop the steamer or from the engine room in
its bowels. Refurbished, the grime removed from face and hands, dressed
in a clean pinafore, she was thumped on one of the red-plush fauteuils
of the gaudy saloon. Magnolia’s hair was almost black and without a
vestige of natural curl. This last was a great cross to Mrs. Hawks, who
spent hours wetting and twining the long dank strands about her
forefinger with a fine-toothed comb in an unconvincing attempt to make a
swan out of her duckling. The rebellious little figure stood clamped
between her mother’s relentless knees. Captured thus, and made fresh,
her restless feet in their clean white stockings and little strapped
black slippers sticking straight out before her, her starched skirts
stiffly spread, she was told to conduct herself as a young lady of her
years and high position should.
“Listen to the conversation of the ladies and gentlemen about you,” Mrs.
Hawks counselled her, severely, “instead of to the low talk of those
greasy engineers and pilots you’re always running off to. I declare I
don’t know what your father is thinking of, to allow it. . . . Or read
your book. . . . Then where is it? Where is the book I bought you
especially to read on this trip? You haven’t opened it, I’ll be bound.
. . . Go get it and come back directly.”
A prissy tale about a female Rollo so prim that Magnolia was sure she
turned her toes out even in her sleep. When she returned with a book (if
she returned at all) it was likely to be of a quite different sort—a
blood-curdling tale of the old days of river banditry—a story, perhaps,
of the rapacious and brutal Murrel and his following of ten hundred
cut-throats sworn to do his evil will; and compared to whom Jesse James
was a philanthropist. The book would have been loaned her by one of the
crew. She adored these bloody tales and devoured them with the avidity
that she always showed for any theme that smacked of the river. It was
snatched away soon enough when it came under her mother’s watchful eye.
Magnolia loathed the red plush and gilt saloon except at night, when its
gilding and mirrors took on a false glitter and richness from the
kerosene lamps that filled wall brackets and chandeliers. Then it was
that the lady passengers, their daytime alpacas and serges replaced by
silks, sat genteelly conversing, reading, or embroidering. Then, if
ever, the gentlemen twirled their mustachios most fiercely so that the
diamond on the third finger of the right hand sparkled entrancingly.
Magnolia derived a sensory satisfaction from the scene. The rich red of
the carpet fed her, and the yellow glow of the lamps. In her best
cashmere dress of brown with the polonaise cut up the front and around
the bottom in deep turrets she sat alertly watching the elaborate
posturings of the silken ladies and the broadcloth gentlemen.
Sometimes one of the ladies sang to the hoarse accompaniment of the
ship’s piano, whose tones always sounded as though the Mississippi River
mist had lodged permanently in its chords. The Southern ladies rendered
tinkling and sentimental ballads. The Mid-western wives were wont to
deliver themselves of songs of a somewhat sterner stuff. There was one
song in particular, sung by a plain and falsetto lady hailing from Iowa,
that aroused in Magnolia a savage (though quite reasoning) loathing. It
was entitled Waste Not, Want Not; Or: You Never Miss The Water Till The
Well Runs Dry. Not being a psychologist, Magnolia did not know why,
during the rendition of the first verse and the chorus, she always
longed to tear her best dress into ribbons and throw a barrel of flour
and a dozen hams into the river. The song ran:
When a child I lived at Lincoln,
With my parents at the farm,
The lessons that my mother taught,
To me were quite a charm.
She would often take me on her knee,
When tired of childish play,
And as she press’d me to her breast,
I’ve heard my mother say:
Chorus: Waste not, want not, is a maxim I would teach——
Escape to the decks or the pilot house was impossible of accomplishment
by night. She extracted what savour she could from the situation. This,
at least, was better than being sent off to bed. All her disorderly life
Magnolia went to bed only when all else failed. Then, too, once in her
tiny cabin she could pose and swoop before the inadequate mirror in
pitiless imitation of the arch alpacas and silks of the red plush
saloon; tapping an imaginary masculine shoulder with a phantom fan;
laughing in an elegant falsetto; grimacing animatedly as she squeaked,
“Deah, yes!” and “Deah, no!” moistening a forelock of her straight black
hair with a generous dressing of saliva wherewith to paste flat to her
forehead the modish spit-curl that graced the feminine adult coiffure.
But during the day she and her father often contrived to elude the
maternal duenna. With her hand in that of the little captain, she roamed
the boat from stem to stern, from bunkers to pilot house. Down in the
engine room she delightedly heard the sweating engineer denounce the
pilot, decks above him, as a goddam Pittsburgh brass pounder because
that monarch, to achieve a difficult landing, had to ring more bells
than the engineer below thought necessary to an expert. But best of all
Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above
the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow
stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the
Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around
you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled;
sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with
your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters
widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the
farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily
that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows
brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you—that is,
Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. The river
curved and twisted and turned and doubled. Mystery always lay just
around the corner of the next bend. But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper,
the chief pilot, always knew. You couldn’t believe that it was possible
for any human brain to remember the things that Captain Andy and Mr.
Pepper knew about that treacherous, shifting, baffling river. Magnolia
delighted to test them. She played a game with Mr. Pepper and with her
father, thus:
“What’s next?”
“Kinney’s woodpile.”
“Now what?”
“Ealer’s Bend.”
“What’ll be there, when we come round that corner?”
“Patrie’s Plantation.”
“What’s around that bend?”
“An old cottonwood with one limb hanging down, struck by lightning.”
“What’s coming now?”
“A stump sticking out of the water at Higgin’s Point.”
They always were right. It was magic. It was incredible. They knew, too,
the depth of the water. They could point out a spot and say, “That used
to be an island—Buckle’s Island.”
“But it’s water! It couldn’t be an island. It’s water. We’re—why, we’re
riding on it now.”
Mr. Pepper would persist, unmoved. “Used to be an island.” Or, pointing
again, “Two years ago I took her right down through there where that
point lays.”
“But it’s dry land. You’re just fooling, aren’t you, Mr. Pepper? Because
you couldn’t take a boat on dry land. It’s got things growing on it!
Little trees, even. So how could you?”
“Water there two years ago—good eleven foot.”
Small wonder Magnolia was early impressed with this writhing monster
that, with a single lash of its tail, could wipe a solid island from the
face of the earth, or with a convulsion of its huge tawny body spew up a
tract of land where only water had been.
Mr. Pepper had respect for his river. “Yessir, the Mississippi and this
here Nile, over in Egypt, they’re a couple of old demons. I ain’t seen
the Nile River, myself. Don’t expect to. This old river’s enough for one
man to meet up with in his life. Like marrying. Get to learn one woman’s
ways real good, you know about all there is to women and you got about
all you can do one lifetime.”
Not at all the salty old graybeard pilot of fiction, this Mr. Pepper. A
youth of twenty-four, nerveless, taciturn, gentle, profane, charming.
His clear brown eyes, gazing unblinkingly out upon the river, had tiny
golden flecks in them, as though something of the river itself had taken
possession of him, and become part of him. Born fifty years later, he
would have been the steel stuff of which aviation aces are made.
Sometimes, in deep water, Mr. Pepper actually permitted Magnolia to turn
the great pilot wheel that measured twice as high as she. He stood
beside her, of course; or her father, if he chanced to be present, stood
behind her. It was thrilling, too, when her father took the wheel in an
exciting place—where the water was very shoal, perhaps; or where the
steamer found a stiff current pushing behind her, and the tricky dusk
coming on. At first it puzzled Magnolia that her father, omnipotent in
all other parts of the _Creole Belle_, should defer to this stripling;
should actually be obliged, on his own steamer, to ask permission of the
pilot to take the wheel. They were both beautifully formal and polite
about it.
“What say to my taking her a little spell, Mr. Pepper?”
“Not at all, Captain Hawks. Not at all, sir,” Mr. Pepper would reply,
cordially if ambiguously. His gesture as he stepped aside and
relinquished the wheel was that of one craftsman who recognizes and
respects the ability of another. Andy Hawks had been a crack Mississippi
River pilot in his day. And then to watch Captain Andy skinning the
wheel—climbing it round and round, hands and feet, and looking for all
the world like a talented little monkey.
Magnolia even learned to distinguish the bells by tone. There was the Go
Ahead, soprano-voiced. Mr. Pepper called it the Jingle. He explained to
Magnolia:
“When I give the engineer the Jingle, why, he knows I mean for him to
give her all she’s got.” Strangely enough, the child, accustomed to the
sex of boats and with an uncannily quick comprehension of river jargon,
understood him, nodded her head so briskly that the hand-made curls
jerked up and down like bell-ropes. “Sometimes it’s called the Soprano.
Then the Centre Bell—the Stopping Bell—that’s middle tone. About alto.
This here, that’s the Astern Bell—the backup bell. That’s bass. The
Boom-Boom, you call it. Here’s how you can remember them: The Jingle,
the Alto, and the Boom-Boom.”
A charming medium through which to know the river, Mr. Pepper. An
enchanting place from which to view the river, that pilot house.
Magnolia loved its shining orderliness, disorderly little creature that
she was. The wilderness of water and woodland outside made its
glass-enclosed cosiness seem the snugger. Oilcloth on the floor. You
opened the drawer of the little table and there lay Mr. Pepper’s pistol,
glittering and sinister; and Mr. Pepper’s Pilot Rules. Magnolia lingered
over the title printed on the brick-coloured paper binding:
PILOT RULES
FOR THE
RIVERS WHOSE WATERS FLOW INTO THE GULF OF
MEXICO AND THEIR TRIBUTARIES
AND FOR
THE RED RIVER OF THE NORTH
The Red River of the North! There was something in the words that
thrilled her; sent little delicious prickles up and down her spine.
There was a bright brass cuspidor. The expertness with which Mr. Pepper
and, for that matter, Captain Hawks himself, aimed for the centre of
this glittering receptacle and sustained a one-hundred-per-cent. record
was as fascinating as any other feature of this delightful place.
Visitors were rarely allowed up there. Passengers might peer wistfully
through the glass enclosure from the steps below, but there they were
confronted by a stern and forbidding sign which read: No Visitors
Allowed. Magnolia felt very superior and slightly contemptuous as she
looked down from her vantage point upon these unfortunates below.
Sometimes, during mid-watch, a very black texas-tender in a very white
starched apron would appear with coffee and cakes or ices for Mr.
Pepper. Magnolia would have an ice, too, shaving it very fine to make it
last; licking the spoon luxuriously with little lightning flicks of her
tongue and letting the frozen sweet slide, a slow delicious trickle,
down her grateful throat.
“Have another cake, Miss Magnolia,” Mr. Pepper would urge her. “A pink
one, I’d recommend, this time.”
“I don’t hardly think my mother——”
Mr. Pepper, himself, surprisingly enough, the father of twins, was sure
her mother would have no objection; would, if present, probably
encourage the suggestion. Magnolia bit quickly into the pink cake. A
wild sense of freedom flooded her. She felt like the river, rushing
headlong on her way.
To be snatched from this ecstatic state was agony. The shadow of the
austere and disapproving maternal figure loomed always just around the
corner. At any moment it might become reality. The knowledge that this
was so made Magnolia’s first taste of Mississippi River life all the
more delicious.
III
Grim force though she was, it would be absurd to fix upon Parthy Ann
Hawks as the sole engine whose relentless functioning cut down the
profits of Captain Andy’s steamboat enterprise. That other metal
monster, the railroad, with its swift-turning wheels and its growing
network of lines, was weaving the doom of river traffic. The Prince
Albert coats and the alpaca basques were choosing a speedier, if less
romantic, way to travel from Natchez to Memphis, or from Cairo to
Vicksburg. Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa business men were favouring a
less hazardous means of transporting their merchandise. Farmers were
freighting their crops by land instead of water. The river steamboat was
fast becoming an anachronism. The jig, Captain Andy saw, was up. Yet the
river was inextricably interwoven with his life—was his life, actually.
He knew no other background, was happy in no other surroundings, had
learned no other trade. These streams, large and small of the North, the
Mid-west, the South, with their harsh yet musical Indian
names—Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Yazoo, Monongahela, Kanawha—he knew in every
season: their currents, depths, landings, banks, perils. The French
strain in him on the distaff side did not save him from pronouncing the
foreign names of Southern rivers as murderously as did the other
rivermen. La Fourche was the Foosh. Bayou Teche was Bayo Tash. As for
names such as Plaquemine, Paincourteville, and Thibodaux—they emerged
mutilated beyond recognition, with entire syllables lopped off, and flat
vowels protruding everywhere. Anything else would have been considered
affected.