now hurled herself at her father, wrapped her arms about him, and
howled, jerking back her head, beating a tattoo with her heels,
interspersing the howls with piteous supplications not to be left
behind. She wanted to see the show boat; and, with the delightful memory
of the _Creole Belle_ trip fresh in her mind, she wanted to travel on
the _Cotton Blossom_ as she had never wanted anything in her life. Her
eyes were staring and distended; her fingers clutched; her body writhed;
her moans were heart-breaking. She gave a magnificent performance.
Andy tried to comfort her. The howls increased. Parthy tried stern
measures. Hysteria. The two united then, and alarm brought pleadings,
and pleadings promises, and finally the three sat intertwined, Andy’s
arm about Magnolia and Parthenia; Parthenia’s arm embracing Andy and
Magnolia; Magnolia clinging to both.
“Come get your hair combed. Mama’ll change your dress. Now stop that
crying.” Magnolia had been shaken by a final series of racking sobs,
real enough now that the mechanics had been started. Her lower lip
quivered at intervals as the wet comb chased the strands of straight
black hair around Mrs. Hawks’ expert forefinger. When finally she
appeared in starched muslin petticoats and second best plaid serge,
there followed behind her Parthy Ann herself bonneted and cloaked for
the street. The thing was done. The wife of a showman. The Puritan in
her shivered, but her curiosity was triumphant even over this. They
marched down Oak Street to the river-landing, the child skipping and
capering in her excitement. There was, too, something of elation in
Andy’s walk. If it had not been for the grim figure at his side and the
restraining hand on his arm, it is not unlikely that the two—father and
child—would have skipped and capered together down to the water’s edge.
Mrs. Hawks’ tread and mien were those of a matronly Christian martyr on
her way to the lions. As they went the parents talked of unimportant
things to which Magnolia properly paid no heed, having had her
way. . . . Gone most of the time. . . . It wouldn’t hurt her any, I tell
you. . . . Learn more in a week than she would in a year out of
books. . . . But they _ain’t_, I tell you. Decent folks as you’d ever
want to see. Married couples, most of ’em. . . . What do you think I’m
running? A bawdy-boat? . . . Oh, language be damned! . . . Now, Parthy,
you’ve got this far, don’t start all over again. . . . There she is!
Ain’t she pretty! Look, Magnolia! That’s where you’re going to
live. . . . Oh, all right, all right! I was just talking . . .
The _Cotton Blossom_ lay moored to great stobs. Long, and wide and plump
and comfortable she looked, like a rambling house that had taken
perversely to the nautical life and now lay at ease on the river’s broad
breast. She had had two coats of white paint with green trimmings; and
not the least of these green trimmings comprised letters, a foot high,
that smote Parthy’s anguished eye, causing her to groan, and Magnolia’s
delighted gaze, causing her to squeal. There it was in all the finality
of painter’s print:
CAPT. ANDY HAWKS COTTON BLOSSOM FLOATING PALACE THEATRE
Parthy gathered her dolman more tightly about her, as though smitten by
a chill. The clay banks of the levee were strewn with cinders and ashes
for a foothold. The steep sides of a river bank down which they would
scramble and up which they would clamber were to be the home path for
these three in the years to come.
An awninged upper deck, like a cosy veranda, gave the great flatboat a
curiously homelike look. On the main deck, too, the gangplank ended in a
forward deck which was like a comfortable front porch. Pillars, adorned
with scroll-work, supported this. And there, its mouth open in a
half-oval of welcome, was the ticket window through which could be seen
the little box office with its desk and chair and its wall rack for
tickets. There actually were tickets stuck in this, purple and red and
blue. Parthy shut her eyes as at a leprous sight. A wide doorway led
into the entrance hall. There again double doors opened to reveal a
stairway.
“Balcony stairs,” Andy explained, “and upper boxes. Seat hundred and
fifty to two hundred, easy. Niggers mostly, upstairs, of course.” Parthy
shuddered. An aisle to the right, an aisle to the left of this stairway,
and there was the auditorium of the theatre itself, with its rows of
seats and its orchestra pit; its stage, its boxes, its painted curtain
raised part way so that you saw only the lower half of the Venetian
water scene it depicted; the legs of gondoliers in wooden attitudes;
faded blue lagoon; palace steps. Magnolia knew a pang of disappointment.
True, the boxes bore shiny brass railings and boasted red plush
upholstered seats.
“But I thought it would be all light and glittery and like a fairy
tale,” she protested.
“At night,” Andy assured her. He had her warm wriggling little fingers
in his. “At night. That’s when it’s like a fairy tale. When the lamps
are lighted; and all the people; and the band playing.”
“Where’s the kitchen?” demanded Mrs. Hawks.
Andy leaped nimbly down into the orchestra pit, stooped, opened a little
door under the stage, and beckoned. Ponderously Parthy followed.
Magnolia scampered after. Dining room and cook’s galley were under the
stage. Great cross-beams hung so low that even Andy was forced to stoop
a little to avoid battering his head against them. Magnolia could touch
them quite easily with her finger-tips. In time it came to seem quite
natural to see the company and crew of the _Cotton Blossom_ entering the
dining room at meal time humbly bent as though in a preliminary attitude
of grace before meat.
There were two long tables, each accommodating perhaps ten; and at the
head of the room a smaller table for six.
“This is our table,” Andy announced, boldly, as he indicated the third.
Parthy snorted; but it seemed to the sensitive Andy that in this snort
there was just a shade less resentment than there might have been.
Between dining room and kitchen an opening, the size of a window frame,
had been cut in the wall, and the base of this was a broad shelf for
convenience in conveying hot dishes from stove to table. As the three
passed from dining room to kitchen, Andy tossed over his shoulder
further information for the possible approval of the bristling Parthy.
“Jo and Queenie—she cooks and he waits and washes up and one thing
another—they promised to be back April first, sure. Been with the
_Cotton Blossom_, those two have, ten years and more. Painters been
cluttering up here, and what not. And will you look at the way the
kitchen looks, spite of ’em. Slick’s a whistle. Look at that stove!”
Crafty Andy.
Parthenia Ann Hawks looked at the stove. And what a stove it was!
Broad-bosomed, ample, vast, like a huge fertile black mammal whose
breast would suckle numberless eager sprawling bubbling pots and pans.
It shone richly. Gazing upon this generous expanse you felt that from
its source could emerge nothing that was not savoury, nourishing,
satisfying. Above it, and around the walls, on hooks, hung rows of pans
and kettles of every size and shape, all neatly suspended by their
pigtails. Here was the wherewithal for boundless cooking. You pictured
whole hams, sizzling; fowls neatly trussed in rows; platoons of brown
loaves; hampers of green vegetables; vast plateaus of pies. Crockery,
thick, white, coarse, was piled, plate on plate, platter on platter,
behind the neat doors of the pantry. A supplementary and redundant
kerosene stove stood obligingly in the corner.
“Little hot snack at night, after the show,” Andy explained. “Coffee or
an egg, maybe, and no lighting the big wood burner.”
There crept slowly, slowly over Parthy’s face a look of speculation, and
this in turn was replaced by an expression that was, paradoxically, at
once eager and dreamy. As though aware of this she tried with words to
belie her look. “All this cooking for a crowd. Take a mint of money,
that’s what it will.”
“Make a mint,” Andy retorted, blithely. A black cat, sleek, lithe, at
ease, paced slowly across the floor, stood a moment surveying the two
with wary yellow eyes, then sidled toward Parthy and rubbed his arched
back against her skirts. “Mouser,” said Andy.
“Scat!” cried Parthy; but her tone was half-hearted, and she did not
move away. In her eyes gleamed the unholy light of the housewife who
beholds for the first time the domain of her dreams. Jo and Queenie to
boss. Wholesale marketing. Do this. Do that. Perhaps Andy, in his zeal,
had even overdone the thing a little. Suddenly, “Where’s that child!
Where’s—— Oh, my goodness, Hawks!” Visions of Magnolia having fallen
into the river. She was, later, always to have visions of Magnolia
having fallen into rivers so that Magnolia sometimes fell into them out
of sheer perversity as other children, cautioned to remain in the yard,
wilfully run away from home.
Andy darted out of the kitchen, through the little rabbit-hutch door.
Mrs. Hawks gathered up her voluminous skirts and flew after; scrambled
across the orchestra pit, turned at the sound of a voice, Magnolia’s,
and yet not Magnolia’s, coming from that portion of the stage exposed
below the half-raised curtain. In tones at once throaty, mincing, and
falsely elegant—that arrogant voice which is childhood’s unconscious
imitation of pretence in its elders—Magnolia was reciting nothing in
particular, and bringing great gusto to the rendition. The words were
palpably made up as she went along—“Oh, do you rully think so! . . . My
little girl is very naughty . . . we are rich, oh dear me yes, ice cream
every day for breakfast, dinner, and supper. . . .” She wore her
mother’s dolman which that lady had unclasped and left hanging over one
of the brass railings of a box. From somewhere she had rummaged a bonnet
whose jet aigrette quivered with the earnestness of its wearer’s
artistic effort. The dolman trailed in the dust of the floor. Magnolia’s
right hand was held in a graceful position, the little finger elegantly
crooked.
“Maggie Hawks, will you come down out of there this instant!” Parthy
whirled on Andy. “There! That’s what it comes to, minute she sets foot
on this sink of iniquity. Play acting!”
Andy clawed his whiskers, chuckling. He stepped to the proscenium and
held out his arms for the child and she stood looking down at him,
flushed, smiling, radiant. “You’re about as good as your pa was, Nola.
And that’s no compliment.” He swung her to the floor, a whirl of dolman,
short starched skirt and bonnet askew. Then, as Parthy snatched the
dolman from her and glared at the bonnet, he saw that he must create
again a favourable impression—contrive a new diversion—or his recent
gain was lost. A born showman, Andy.
“Where’d you get that bonnet, Magnolia?”
“In there.” She pointed to one of a row of doors facing them at the rear
of the stage. “In one of those little bedrooms—cabins—what are they,
Papa?”
“Dressing rooms, Nola, and bedrooms, too. Want to see them, Parthy?” He
opened a little door leading from the right-hand box to the stage,
crossed the stage followed by the reluctant Parthenia, threw open one of
the doors at the back. There was revealed a tiny cabin holding a single
bed, a diminutive dresser, and washstand. Handy rows of shelves were
fastened to the wall above the bed. Dimity curtains hung at the window.
The window itself framed a view of river and shore. A crudely coloured
calendar hung on the wall, and some photographs and newspaper clippings,
time-yellowed. There was about the little chamber a cosiness, a
snugness, and, paradoxically enough, a sense of space. That was the open
window, doubtless, with its vista of water and sky giving the effect of
freedom.
“Dressing rooms during the performance,” Andy explained, “and bedrooms
the rest of the time. That’s the way we work it.”
Mrs. Hawks, with a single glance, encompassed the tiny room and rejected
it. “Expect me to live in a cubby-hole like that!” It was,
unconsciously, her first admission.
Magnolia, behind her mother’s skirts, was peering, wide-eyed, into the
room. “Why, I _love_ it! Why, I’d love to live in it. Why, look, there’s
a little bed, and a dresser, and a——”
Andy interrupted hastily. “Course I don’t expect you to live in a
cubby-hole, Parthy. No, nor the child, neither. Just you step along with
me. Now don’t say anything; and stop your grumbling till you see. Put
that bonnet back, Nola, where you got it. That’s wardrobe. Which room’d
you get it out of?”
Across the stage, then, up the aisle to the stairway that led to the
balcony, Andy leading, Mrs. Hawks following funereally, Magnolia playing
a zigzag game between the rows of seats yet managing mysteriously to
arrive at the foot of the stairs just as they did. The balcony reached,
Magnolia had to be rescued from the death that in Mrs. Hawks’ opinion
inevitably would result from her leaning over the railing to gaze
enthralled on the auditorium and stage below. “Hawks, will you look at
that child! I declare, if I ever get her off this boat alive I’ll never
set foot on it again.”
But her tone somehow lacked conviction. And when she beheld those
two upper bedrooms forward, leading off the balcony—those two square
roomy bedrooms, as large, actually, as her bedroom in the cottage,
she was lost. The kitchen had scored. But the bedrooms won. They were
connected by a little washroom. Each had two windows. Each held bed,
dresser, rocker, stove. Bedraggled dimity curtains hung at the windows.
Matting covered the floors. Parthy did an astonishing—though
characteristic—thing. She walked to the dresser, passed a practised
forefinger over its surface, examined the finger critically, and uttered
that universal tongue-and-tooth sound indicating disapproval. “An inch
thick,” she then said. “A sight of cleaning this boat will take, I can
tell you. Not a curtain in the place but’ll have to come down and washed
and starched and ironed.”
Instinct or a superhuman wisdom cautioned Andy to say nothing. From the
next room came a shout of joy. “Is this my room? It’s got a chair that
rocks and a stove with a res’vore and I can see my whole self in the
looking-glass, it’s so big. Is this my room? Is it? Mama!”
Parthy passed into the next room. “We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see.”
Andy followed after, almost a-tiptoe; afraid to break the spell with a
sudden sound.
“But is it? I want to know. Papa, make her tell me. Look! The window
here is a little door. It’s a door and I can go right out on the
upstairs porch. And there’s the whole river.”
“I should say as much, and a fine way to fall and drown without anybody
being the wiser.”
But the child was beside herself with excitement and suspense. She could
endure it no longer; flew to her stern parent and actually shook that
adamantine figure in its dolman and bonnet. “Is it? Is it? Is it?”
“We’ll see.” A look, then, of almost comic despair flashed between
father and child—a curiously adult look for one of Magnolia’s years. It
said: “What a woman this is! Can we stand it? I can only if you can.”
Andy tried suggestion. “Could paint this furniture any colour Nola
says——”
“Blue,” put in Magnolia, promptly.
“—and new curtains, maybe, with ribbons to match——” He had, among
other unexpected traits, a keen eye for colour and line; a love for
fabrics.
Parthy said nothing. Her lips were compressed. The look that passed
between Andy and Magnolia now was pure despair, with no humour to
relieve it. So they went disconsolately out of the door; crossed the
balcony, clumped down the stairs, like mutes at a funeral. At the foot
of the stairs they heard voices from without—women’s voices, high and
clear—and laughter. The sounds came from the little porch-like deck
forward. Parthy swooped through the door; had scarcely time to gaze upon
two sprightly females in gay plumage before both fell upon her lawful
husband Captain Andy Hawks and embraced him. And the young pretty one
kissed him on his left-hand mutton-chop whisker. And the older plain one
kissed him on the right-hand mutton-chop whisker. And, “Oh, dear Captain
Hawks!” they cried. “Aren’t you surprised to see us! And happy! Do say
you’re happy. We drove over from Cairo specially to see you and the
_Cotton Blossom_. Doc’s with us.”
Andy flung an obliging arm about the waist of each and gave each armful
a little squeeze. “Happy ain’t the word.” And indeed it scarcely seemed
to cover the situation; for there stood Parthy viewing the three
entwined, and as she stood she seemed to grow visibly taller, broader,
more ominous, like a menacing cloud. Andy’s expression was a protean
thing in which bravado and apprehension battled.
Magnolia had recognized them at once as the pretty young woman in the
rose-trimmed hat and the dark woman who had told her not to smile too
often that day when, in company with the sloppy young man, they had
passed the Hawks house, laughing and chatting and spitting cherry stones
idly and comfortably into the dust of the village street. So she now
took a step forward from behind her mother’s voluminous skirts and made
a little tentative gesture with one hand toward the older woman. And
that lively female at once said, “Why, bless me! Look, Elly! It’s the
little girl!”
Elly looked. “What little girl?”
“The little girl with the smile.” And at that, quite without
premeditation, and to her own surprise, Magnolia ran to her and put her
hand in hers and looked up into her strange ravaged face and smiled.
“There!” exclaimed the woman, exactly as she had done that first time.
“Maggie Hawks!” came the voice.
And, “Oh, my God!” exclaimed the one called Elly, “it’s the——” sensed
something dangerous in the air, laughed, and stopped short.
Andy extricated himself from his physical entanglements and attempted to
do likewise with the social snarl that now held them all.
“Meet my wife Mrs. Hawks. Parthy, this is Julie Dozier, female half of
our general business team and one of the finest actresses on the river
besides being as nice a little lady as you’d meet in a month of
Sundays. . . . This here little beauty is Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne
on the bills. Our ingénue lead and a favourite from Duluth to New
Orleans. . . . Where’s Doc?”
At which, with true dramatic instinct, Doc appeared scrambling down the
cinder path toward the boat; leaped across the gangplank, poised on one
toe, spread his arms and carolled, “Tra-da!” A hard-visaged man of about
fifty-five, yet with kindness, too, written there; the deep-furrowed,
sad-eyed ageless face of the circus shillaber and showman.
“Girls say you drove over. Must be flush with your spondulicks,
Doc. . . . Parthy, meet Doc. He’s got another name, I guess, but
nobody’s ever used it. Doc’s enough for anybody on the river. Doc goes
ahead of the show and bills us and does the dirty work, don’t you, Doc?”
“That’s about the size of it,” agreed Doc, and sped sadly and accurately
a comet of brown juice from his lips over the boat’s side into the
river. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Andy indicated Magnolia. “Here’s my girl Magnolia you’ve heard me talk
about.”
“Well, well! Lookit them eyes! They oughtn’t to go bad in the show
business, little later.” A sound from Parthy who until now had stood a
graven image, a portent. Doc turned to her, soft-spoken, courteous.
“Fixin’ to take a little ride with us for good luck I hope, ma’am, our
first trip out with Cap here?”
Mrs. Hawks glanced then at the arresting face of Julie Dozier, female
half of our general business team and one of the finest actresses on the
river. Mrs. Hawks looked at Elly Chipley (Lenore La Verne on the bills),
the little beauty and favourite from Duluth to New Orleans. She breathed
deep.
“Yes. I am.” And with those three monosyllables Parthenia Ann Hawks
renounced the ties of land, of conventionality; forsook the staid
orderliness of the little white-painted cottage at Thebes; shut her ears
to the scandalized gossip of her sedate neighbours; yielded grimly to
the urge of the river and became at last its unwilling mistress.
V
When April came, and the dogwood flashed its spectral white in
the woods, the show boat started. It was the most leisurely and
dream-like of journeys. In all the hurried harried country that
still was intent on repairing the ravages of a Civil War, they
alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on
another plane. Miles—hundreds—thousands of miles of willow-fringed
streams flowing aquamarine in the sunlight, olive-green in the shade.
Wild honeysuckle clambering over black tree trunks. Mules. Negroes.
Bare unpainted cabins the colour of the sandy soil itself. Sleepy
little villages blinking drowsily down upon a river which was some
almost forgotten offspring spawned years before by the Mississippi.
The nearest railroad perhaps twenty-five miles distant.
They floated down the rivers. They floated down the rivers. Sometimes
they were broad majestic streams rolling turbulently to the sea, and
draining a continent. Sometimes they were shallow narrow streams little
more than creeks, through which the _Cotton Blossom_ picked her way as
cautiously as a timid girl picking her way among stepping stones. Behind
them, pushing them maternally along like a fat puffing duck with her
silly little gosling, was the steamboat _Mollie Able_.
To the people dwelling in the towns, plantations, and hamlets along the
many tributaries of the Mississippi and Ohio, the show boat was no
longer a novelty. It had been a familiar and welcome sight since 1817
when the first crude barge of that type had drifted down the Cumberland
River. But familiarity with these craft had failed to dispel their
glamour. To the farmers and villagers of the Mid-west; and to the small
planters—black and white—of the South, the show boat meant music,
romance, gaiety. It visited towns whose leafy crypts had never echoed
the shrill hoot of an engine whistle. It penetrated settlements whose
backwoods dwellers had never witnessed a theatrical performance in all
their lives—simple childlike credulous people to whom the make-believe
villainies, heroics, loves, adventures of the drama were so real as
sometimes to cause the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe actual embarrassment.
Often quality folk came to the show boat. The perfume and silks and
broadcloth of the Big House took frequent possession of the lower boxes
and the front seats.
That first summer was, to Magnolia, a dream of pure delight. Nothing
could mar it except that haunting spectre of autumn when she would have
to return to Thebes and to the ordinary routine of a little girl in a
second best pinafore that was donned for school in the morning and
thriftily replaced by a less important pinafore on her return from
school in the late afternoon. But throughout those summer months
Magnolia was a fairy princess. She was Cinderella at the ball. She shut
her mind to the horrid certainty that the clock would inevitably strike
twelve.
Year by year, as the spell of the river grew stronger and the easy
indolence of the life took firmer hold, Mrs. Hawks and the child spent
longer and longer periods on the show boat; less and less time in the
humdrum security of the cottage ashore. Usually the boat started in
April. But sometimes, when the season was mild, it was March. Mrs. Hawks
would announce with a good deal of firmness that Magnolia must finish
the school term, which ended in June. Later she and the child would join
the boat wherever it happened to be showing at the time.
“Couple of months missed won’t hurt her,” Captain Andy would argue,
loath as always to be separated from his daughter. “May’s the grandest
month on the rivers—and April. Everything coming out fresh. Outdoors
all day. Do her good.”
“I may not know much, but this I do know, Andy Hawks: No child of mine
is going to grow up an ignoramus just because her father has nothing
better to do than go galumphing around the country with a lot of
riff-raff.”