house in Thebes, home, to Andy, was a boat. Towns and cities were to him
mere sources of supplies and passengers, set along the river banks for
the convenience of steamboats. He knew every plank in every
river-landing from St. Paul to Baton Rouge. As the sky is revealed, a
printed page, to the astronomer, so Andy Hawks knew and interpreted
every reef, sand bar, current, and eddy in the rivers that drained the
great Mississippi Basin. And of these he knew best of all the
Mississippi herself. He loved her, feared her, respected her. Now her
courtiers and lovers were deserting her, one by one, for an
iron-throated, great-footed, brazen-voiced hussy. Andy, among the few,
remained true.
To leave the river—to engage, perforce, in some landlubberly pursuit
was to him unthinkable. On the rivers he was a man of consequence. As a
captain and pilot of knowledge and experience his opinion was deferred
to. Once permanently ashore, penduluming prosaically between the precise
little household and some dull town job, he would degenerate and wither
until inevitably he who now was Captain Andy Hawks, owner and master of
the steamboat _Creole Belle_, would be known merely as the husband of
Parthy Ann Hawks, that Mistress of the Lace Curtains, Priestess of the
Parlour Carpet, and Keeper of the Kitchen Floor. All this he did not
definitely put into words; but he sensed it.
He cast about in his alert mind, and made his plans craftily, and put
them warily, for he knew the force of Parthenia’s opposition.
“I see here where old Ollie Pegram’s fixing to sell his show boat.” He
was seated in the kitchen, smoking his pipe and reading the local
newspaper. “_Cotton Blossom_, she’s called.”
Parthy Ann was not one to simulate interest where she felt none.
Bustling between stove and pantry she only half heard him. “Well, what
of it?”
Captain Andy rattled the sheet he was holding, turned a page leisurely,
meanwhile idly swinging one leg, as he sat with knees crossed. Each
movement was calculated to give the effect of casualness.
“Made a fortune in the show-boat business, Ollie has. Ain’t a town on
the river doesn’t wait for the _Cotton Blossom_. Yessir. Anybody buys
that outfit is walking into money.”
“Scallywags.” Thus, succinctly, Parthenia thought to dismiss the subject
while voicing her opinion of water thespians.
“Scallywags nothing! Some of the finest men on the river in the
show-boat business. Look at Pegram! Look at Finnegan! Look at Hosey
Watts!”
It was Mrs. Hawks’ habit to express contempt by reference to a ten-foot
pole, this being an imaginary implement of disdain and a weapon of
defence which was her Excalibur. She now announced that not only would
she decline to look at the above-named gentlemen, but that she could not
be induced to touch any of them with a ten-foot pole. She concluded with
the repetitious “Scallywags!” and evidently considered the subject
closed.
Two days later, the first pang of suspicion darted through her when Andy
renewed the topic with an assumption of nonchalance that failed to
deceive her this time. It was plain to this astute woman that he had
been thinking concentratedly about show boats since their last brief
conversation. It was at supper. Andy should have enjoyed his home-cooked
meals more than he actually did. They always were hot, punctual,
palatable. Parthenia had kept her cooking hand. Yet he often ate
abstractedly and unappreciatively. Perhaps he missed the ceremony, the
animation, the sociability that marked the meal hours in the dining
saloon of the _Creole Belle_. The Latin in him, and the unconsciously
theatrical in him, loved the mental picture of himself in his blue coat
with brass buttons and gold braid, seated at the head of the long table
while the alpacas twittered, “Do you think so, Captain Hawks?” and the
Prince Alberts deferred to him with, “What’s your opinion, sir?” and the
soft-spoken black stewards in crackling white jackets bent over him with
steaming platters and tureens.
Parthenia did not hold with conversation at meal time. Andy and Magnolia
usually carried on such talk as occurred at table. Strangely enough,
there was in his tone toward the child none of the usual patronizing
attitude of the adult. No what-did-you-learn-at-school; no
have-you-been-a-good-girl-to-day. They conversed like two somewhat rowdy
grown-ups, constantly chafed by the reprovals of the prim Parthenia. It
was a habit of Andy seldom to remain seated in his chair throughout a
meal. Perhaps this was due to the fact that he frequently was called
away from table while in command of his steamer. At home his jumpiness
was a source of great irritation to Mrs. Hawks. Her contributions to the
conversation varied little.
“Pity’s sake, Hawks, sit still! That’s the third time you’ve been up and
down, and supper not five minutes on the table. . . . Eat your potato,
Magnolia, or not a bite of cup cake do you get. . . . That’s a fine
story to be telling a child, I must say, Andy Hawks. . . . Can’t you
talk of anything but a lot of good-for-nothing drunken river
roustabouts! . . . Drink your milk, Maggie. . . . Oh, stop fidgeting,
Hawks! . . . Don’t cut away all the fat like that, Magnolia. No wonder
you’re so skinny I’m ashamed of you and the neighbours think you don’t
get enough to eat.”
Like a swarm of maddening mosquitoes, these admonitions buzzed through
and above and around the conversation of the man and the child.
To-night Andy’s talk dwelt on a dramatic incident that had been told him
that day by the pilot of the show boat _New Sensation_, lately burned to
the water’s edge. He went on vivaciously, his bright brown eyes
sparkling with interest and animation. Now and then, he jumped up from
the table the better to illustrate a situation. Magnolia was following
his every word and gesture with spellbound attention. She never had been
permitted to see a show-boat performance. When one of these gay water
travellers came prancing down the river, band playing, calliope tooting,
flags flying, towboat puffing, bringing up with a final flare and
flourish at the landing, there to tie up for two or three days, or even,
sometimes, for a week, Magnolia was admonished not to go near it. Other
children of the town might swarm over it by day, enchanted by its
mystery, enthralled by its red-coated musicians when the band marched up
the main street; might even, at night, witness the performance of a play
and actually stay for the song-and-dance numbers which comprised the
“concert” held after the play, and for which an additional charge of
fifteen cents was made.
Magnolia hungered for a glimpse of these forbidden delights. The little
white house at Thebes commanded a view up the river toward Cape
Girardeau. At night from her bedroom window she could see the lights
shining golden yellow through the boat’s many windows, was fired with
excitement at sight of the kerosene flares stuck in the river bank to
light the way of the lucky, could actually hear the beat and blare of
the band. Again and again, in her very early childhood, the spring
nights when the show boats were headed downstream and the autumn nights
when they were returning up river were stamped indelibly on her mind as
she knelt in her nightgown at the little window of the dark room that
faced the river with its dazzling and forbidden spectacle. Her bare feet
would be as icy as her cheeks were hot. Her ears were straining to catch
the jaunty strains of the music, and her eyes tried to discern the faces
that passed under the weird glow of the torch flares. Usually she did
not hear the approaching tread of discovery until the metallic,
“Magnolia Hawks, get into your bed this very minute!” smote cruelly on
her entranced ears. Sometimes she glimpsed men and women of the
show-boat troupe on Front Street or Third Street, idling or shopping.
Occasionally you saw them driving in a rig hired from Deffler’s Livery
Stable. They were known to the townspeople as Show Folks, and the term
carried with it the sting of opprobrium. You could mark them by
something different in their dress, in their faces, in the way they
walked. The women were not always young. Magnolia noticed that often
they were actually older than her mother (Parthy was then about
thirty-nine). Yet they looked lively and somehow youthful, though their
faces bore wrinkles. There was about them a certain care-free gaiety, a
jauntiness. They looked, Magnolia decided, as if they had just come from
some interesting place and were going to another even more interesting.
This was rather shrewd of her. She had sensed that the dulness of
village and farm life, the look that routine, drudgery, and boredom
stamp indelibly on the countenance of the farm woman or the village
housewife, were absent in these animated and often odd faces. Once she
had encountered a little group of three—two women and a man—strolling
along the narrow plank sidewalk near the Hawks house. They were eating
fruit out of a bag, sociably, and spitting out the seeds, and laughing
and chatting and dawdling. One of the women was young and very pretty,
and her dress, Magnolia thought, was the loveliest she had ever seen.
Its skirt of navy blue was kilted in the back, and there were puffs up
each side edged with passementerie. On her head, at a saucy angle, was a
chip bonnet of blue, trimmed with beaded lace, and ribbon, and adorable
pink roses. The other woman was much older. There were queer deep lines
in her face—not wrinkles, though Magnolia could not know this, but the
scars left when the gashes of experience have healed. Her eyes were
deep, and dark, and dead. She was carelessly dressed, and the
box-pleated tail of her flounced black gown trailed in the street, so
that it was filmed with a gray coating of dust. The veil wound round her
bonnet hung down her back, imparting a Spanish and mysterious look. The
man, too, though young and tall and not bad-looking, wore an unkempt
look. His garments were ill assorted. His collar boasted no cravat. But
all three had a charming air of insouciance as they strolled up the
tree-shaded village street, laughing and chatting and munching and
spitting out cherry stones with a little childish ballooning of the
cheeks. Magnolia hung on the Hawks fence gate and stared. The older
woman caught her eye and smiled, and immediately Magnolia decided that
she liked her better than she did the pretty, young one, so after a
moment’s grave inspection she smiled in return her sudden, brilliant
wide smile.
“Look at that child,” said the older woman. “All of a sudden she’s
beautiful.”
The other two surveyed her idly. Magnolia’s smile had vanished now. They
saw a scrawny sallow little girl, big-eyed, whose jaw conformation was
too plainly marked, whose forehead was too high and broad, and whose
black hair deceived no one into believing that its dank curls were other
than tortured.
“You’re crazy, Julie,” remarked the pretty girl, without heat; and
looked away, uninterested.
But between Magnolia and the older woman a filament of live liking had
leaped. “Hello, little girl,” said the older woman.
Magnolia continued to stare, gravely; said nothing.
“Won’t you say hello to me?” the woman persisted; and smiled again. And
again Magnolia returned her smile. “There!” the woman exclaimed, in
triumph. “What did I tell you!”
“Cat’s got her tongue,” the sloppy young man remarked as his
contribution to the conversation.
“Oh, come on,” said the pretty girl; and popped another cherry into her
mouth.
But the woman persisted. She addressed Magnolia gravely. “When you grow
up, don’t smile too often; but smile whenever you want anything very
much, or like any one, or want them to like you. But I guess maybe
you’ll learn that without my telling you. . . . Listen, won’t you say
hello to me? H’m?”
Magnolia melted. “I’m not allowed,” she explained.
“Not——? Why not? Pity’s sake!”
“Because you’re show-boat folks. My mama won’t let me talk to show-boat
folks.”
“Damned little brat,” said the pretty girl, and spat out a cherry stone.
The man laughed.
With a lightning gesture the older woman took off her hat, stuffed it
under the man’s arm, twisted her abundant hair into a knob off her face,
pulled down her mouth and made a narrow line of her lips, brought her
elbows sharply to her side, her hands clasped, her shoulders suddenly
pinched.
“Your mama looks like this,” she said.
“Why, how did you know!” cried Magnolia, amazed. The three burst into
sudden loud laughter. And at that Parthy Hawks appeared at the door,
bristling, protective.
“Maggie Hawks, come into the house this minute!”
The laughter of the three then was redoubled. The quiet little village
street rang with it as they continued their leisurely care-free ramble
up the sun-dappled leafy path.
Now her father, at supper, had a tale to tell of these forbidden
fascinators. The story had been told him that afternoon by Hard Harry
Swager, river pilot, just in at the landing after a thrilling
experience.
“Seems they were playing at China Grove, on the Chappelia. Yessir. Well,
this girl—La Verne, her name was, or something—anyway, she was on the
stage singing, he says. It was the concert, after the show. She comes
off and the next thing you know there’s a little blaze in the flies.
Next minute she was afire and no saving her.” To one less initiated it
might have been difficult to differentiate in his use of the pronoun,
third person, feminine. Sometimes he referred to the girl, sometimes to
the boat. “Thirty years old if she’s a day and burns like greased paper.
Went up in ten minutes. Hard Harry goes running to the pilot house to
get his clothes. Time he reaches the boiler deck, fire has cut off the
gangway. He tries to lower himself twelve feet from the boiler deck to
the main, and falls and breaks his leg. By that time they were cutting
the towboat away from the _Sensation_ to save her. Did save her, too,
finally. But the _Sensation_ don’t last long’s it takes to tell it.
Well, there he was, and what did they have to do but send four miles
inland for a doctor, and when he comes, the skunk, guess what?”
“What!” cries Magnolia not merely to be obliging in this dramatic
crisis, but because she is frantic to know. Captain Andy is on his feet
by this time, fork in hand.
“When the doc comes he takes a look around, and there they all are in
any kind of clothes they could grab or had on. So he says he won’t set
the leg unless he’s paid in advance, twenty-five dollars. ‘Oh, you
won’t, won’t you!’ says Hard Harry, laying there with his broken leg.
And draws. ‘You’ll set it or I’ll shoot yours off so you won’t ever walk
again, you son of a bitch!’”
“Captain Andy Hawks!”
He has acted it out. The fork is his gun. Magnolia is breathless. Now
both gaze, stricken, at Mrs. Hawks. Their horror is not occasioned by
the word spoken but by the interruption.
“Go on!” shouts Magnolia; and bounces up and down in her chair. “Go
_on_!”
But the first fine histrionic flavour has been poisoned by that
interruption. Andy takes his seat at table. He resumes the eating of his
pork steak and potatoes, but listlessly. Perhaps he is a little ashamed
of the extent to which he has been carried away by his own recital.
“Slipped out,” he mumbled.
“Well, I should say as much!” Parthy retorted, ambiguously. “What kind
of language can a body expect, you hanging around show-boat riff-raff.”
Magnolia would not be cheated of her dénouement. “But did he? Did he
shoot it off, or did he fix it, or what? What did he do?”
“He set it, all right. They gave him his twenty-five and told him to get
the h—— out of there, and he got. But they had to get the boat
out—the towboat they’d saved—and no pilot but Hard Harry. So next day
they put him on the hurricane deck, under a tarpaulin because the rain
was pouring the way it does down there worse than any place in the
world, just about. And with two men steering, he brings the boat to
Baton Rouge seventy-five miles through bayou and Mississippi. Yessir.”
Magnolia breathed again.
“And who’s this,” demanded Mrs. Hawks, “was telling you all this
fol-de-rol, did you say?”
“Swager himself. Harry. Hard Harry Swager, they call him.” (You could
see the ten-foot pole leap of itself into Mrs. Hawks’ hand as her
fingers drummed the tablecloth.) “I was talking to him to-day. Here of
late he’s been with the _New Sensation_. He piloted the _Cotton Blossom_
for years till Pegram decided to quit. Well, sir! He says five hundred
people a night on the show boat was nothing, and eight hundred on
Saturday nights in towns with a good back-country. Let me tell you right
here and now that runs into money. Say a quarter of ’em’s fifty centers,
a half thirty-five, and the rest twenty-five. The niggers all
twenty-five up in the gallery, course. Naught . . . five times five’s
. . . five and carry the two . . . five times two’s ten carry the one
. . . five . . .”
Parthy was no fool. She sensed that here threatened a situation
demanding measures even more than ordinarily firm.
“I may not know much”—another form of locution often favoured by her.
The tone in which it was spoken utterly belied the words; the tone told
you that not only did she know much, but all. “I may not know much, but
this I do know. You’ve got something better to do with your time than
loafing down at the landing like a river rat with that scamp Swager.
Hard Harry! He comes honestly enough by that name, I’ll be bound, if he
never came honestly by anything else in his life. And before the child,
too. Show boats! And language!”
“What’s wrong with show boats?”
“Everything, and more, too. A lot of loose-living worthless scallywags,
men _and_ women. Scum, that’s what. Trollops!” Parthy could use a good
old Anglo-Saxon word herself, on occasion.
Captain Andy made frantic foray among the whiskers. He clawed like a
furious little monkey—always the sign of mental disturbance in him. “No
more scum than your own husband, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am. I used to be with a
show-boat troupe myself.”
“Pilot, yes.”
“Pilot be damned.” He was up now and capering like a Quilp. “Actor, Mrs.
Hawks, and pretty good I was, too, time I was seventeen or eighteen. You
ought to’ve seen me in the after-piece. Red Hot Coffee it was called. I
played the nigger. Doubled in brass, too. I pounded the bass drum in the
band, and it was bigger than me.”
Magnolia was enchanted. She sprang up, flew round to him. “Were you
really? An actor? You never told me. Mama, did you know? Did you know
Papa was an actor on a show boat?”
Parthy Ann rose in her wrath. Always taller than her husband, she seemed
now to tower above him. He defied her, a terrier facing a mastiff.
“What kind of talk is this, Andy Hawks! If you’re making up tales to
tease me before the child I’m surprised at you, that thought nothing you
could do would ever surprise me again.”
“It’s the truth. The _Sunny South_, she was called. Captain Jake
Bofinger, owner. Married ten times, old Jake was. A pretty rough lot we
were in those days, let me tell you. I remember time we——”
“Not another word, Captain Hawks. And let me tell you it’s a good thing
for you that you kept it from me all these years. I’d never have married
you if I’d known. A show-boat actor!”
“Oh, yes, you would, Parthy. And glad of the chance.”
Words. Bickering. Recriminations. Finally, “I’ll thank you not to
mention show boats again in front of the child. You with your La Vernes
and your Hard Harrys and your concerts and broken legs and fires and ten
wives and language and what not! I don’t want to be dirtied by it, nor
the child. . . . Run out and play, Magnolia. . . . And let this be the
last of show-boat talk in this house.”
Andy breathed deep, clung with both hands to his whiskers, and took the
plunge. “It’s far from being the last of it, Parthy. I’ve bought the
_Cotton Blossom_ from Pegram.”
IV
Many quarrels had marked their married life, but this one assumed
serious proportions. It was a truly sinister note in the pageant of
mismating that passed constantly before Magnolia’s uncomprehending
eyes in childhood. Parthenia had opposed him often, and certainly
always when a new venture or plan held something of the element of
unconventionality. But now the Puritan in her ran rampant. He would
disgrace her before the community. He was ruining the life of his child.
She would return to her native New England. He would not see Magnolia
again. He had explained to her—rather, it had come out piecemeal—that
his new project would necessitate his absence from home for months at a
time. He would be away, surely, from April until November. If Parthy and
the child would live with him on the show boat part of that
time—summers—easy life—lots to see—learn the country——
The storm broke, raged, beat about his head, battered his diminutive
frame. He clutched his whiskers and hung on for dear life. In the end he
won.
All that Parthy ever had in her life of colour, of romance, of change,
he brought her. But for him she would still be ploughing through the
drifts or mud of the New England road on her way to and from the frigid
little schoolhouse. But for him she would still be living her barren
spinster life with her salty old father in the grim coast town whence
she had come. She was to trail through the vine-hung bayous of
Louisiana; float down the generous rivers of the Carolinas, of
Tennessee, of Mississippi, with the silver-green weeping willows misting
the water’s edge. She was to hear the mellow plaintive voices of Negroes
singing on the levees and in cabin doorways as the boat swept by. She
would taste exotic fruits; see stirring sights; meet the fantastic
figures that passed up and down the rivers like shadows drifting in and
out of a weird dream. Yet always she was to resent loveliness; fight the
influence of each new experience; combat the lure of each new face.
Tight-lipped, belligerent, she met beauty and adventure and defied them
to work a change in her.
For three days, then, following Andy’s stupendous announcement,
Parthenia threatened to leave him, though certainly, in an age that
looked upon the marriage tie as well-nigh indissoluble by any agent
other than death, she could not have meant it, straight-laced as she
was. For another three days she refused to speak to him, conveying her
communications to him through a third person who was, perforce,
Magnolia. “Tell your father thus-and-so.” This in his very presence.
“Ask your father this-and-that.”
Experience had taught Magnolia not to be bewildered by these tactics;
she was even amused, as at a game. But finally the game wearied her; or
perhaps, child though she was, an instinctive sympathy between her and
her father made her aware of the pain twisting the face of the man.
Suddenly she stamped her foot, issued her edict. “I won’t tell him
another single word for you. It’s silly. I thought it was kind of fun,
but it isn’t. It’s silly for a great big grown-up person like you that’s
a million years old.”
Andy was absent from home all day long, and often late into the night.
The _Cotton Blossom_ was being overhauled from keel to pilot house. She
was lying just below the landing; painters and carpenters were making
her shipshape. Andy trotted up and down the town and the river bank,
talking, gesticulating, capering excitedly. There were numberless
supplies to be ordered; a troupe to be assembled. He was never without a
slip of paper on which he figured constantly. His pockets and the lining
of his cap bristled with these paper scraps.
One week following their quarrel Parthy Ann began to evidence interest
in these negotiations. She demanded details. How much had he paid for
that old mass of kindling wood? (meaning, of course, the _Cotton
Blossom_). How many would its theatre seat? What did the troupe number?
What was their route? How many deck-hands? One cook or two? Interspersed
with these questions were grumblings and dire predictions anent money
thrown away; poverty in old age; the advisability of a keeper being
appointed for people whose minds had palpably given way. Still, her
curiosity was obviously intense.
“Tell you what,” suggested Andy with what he fancied to be infinite
craft. “Get your hat on come on down and take a look at her.”
“Never,” said Parthenia; and untied her kitchen apron.
“Well, then, let Magnolia go down and see her. She likes boats, don’t
you, Nola? Same’s her pa.”
“H’m! Likely I’d let her go,” sniffed Parthy.
Andy tried another tack. “Don’t you want to come and see where your
papa’s going to live all the months and months he’ll be away from you
and ma?”
At which Magnolia, with splendid dramatic sense, began to cry wildly and
inconsolably. Parthy remained grim. Yet she must have been immediately
disturbed, for Magnolia wept so seldom as to be considered a queer child
on this count, among many others.
“Hush your noise,” commanded Parthy.
Great sobs racked Magnolia. Andy crudely followed up his advantage. “I
guess you’ll forget how your papa looks time he gets back.”