was Mrs. Hawks hanging fresh dimity curtains; bickering with Queenie;
preventing, by her acid presence, the possibility of a too-saccharine
existence for the members of the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe. In her old
capacity as school teacher, Parthy undertook the task of carrying on
Magnolia’s education during these truant spring months. It was an
acrimonious and painful business ending, almost invariably, in temper,
tears, disobedience, upbraidings. Unconsciously Andy Hawks had done much
for the youth of New England when he ended Parthy’s public teaching
career.
“Nine times seven, I said. . . . No, it isn’t! Just because fifty-six
was the right answer last time it isn’t right every time. That was seven
times eight and I’ll thank you to look at the book and not out of the
window. I declare, Maggie Hawks, sometimes I think you’re downright
simple.”
Magnolia’s under lip would come out. Her brow was lowering. She somehow
always looked her plainest and sallowest during these sessions with her
mother. “I don’t care what nine times seven is. Elly doesn’t know,
either. I asked her and she said she never had nine of anything, much
less nine times seven of anything; and Elly’s the most beautiful person
in the world, except Julie sometimes—and me when I smile. And my name
isn’t Maggie Hawks, either.”
“I’d like to know what it is if it isn’t. And if you talk to me like
that again, young lady, I’ll smack you just as sure as I’m sitting
here.”
“It’s Magnolia—Magnolia—uh—something beautiful—I don’t know what.
But not Hawks. Magnolia—uh——” a gesture with her right hand meant to
convey some idea of the exquisiteness of her real name.
Mrs. Hawks clapped a maternal hand to her daughter’s somewhat bulging
brow, decided that she was feverish, needed a physic, and promptly
administered one.
As for geography, if Magnolia did not learn it, she lived it. She came
to know her country by travelling up and down its waterways. She learned
its people by meeting them, of all sorts and conditions. She learned
folkways; river lore; Negro songs; bird calls; pilot rules; profanity;
the art of stage make-up; all the parts in the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe’s
repertoire including East Lynne, Lady Audley’s Secret, Tempest and
Sunshine, Spanish Gipsy, Madcap Margery, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
There probably was much that was sordid about the life. But to the
imaginative and volatile little girl of ten or thereabouts it was a
combination playhouse, make-believe theatre, and picnic jaunt. Hers were
days of enchantment—or would have been were it not for the practical
Parthy who, iron woman that she was, saw to it that the child was
properly fed, well clothed, and sufficiently refreshed by sleep. But
Parthy’s interests now were too manifold and diverse to permit of her
accustomed concentration on Magnolia. She had an entire boatload of
people to boss—two boatloads, in fact, for she did not hesitate to
investigate and criticize the manners and morals of the crew that manned
the towboat _Mollie Able_. A man was never safe from her as he sat
smoking his after-dinner pipe and spitting contemplatively into the
river. It came about that Magnolia’s life was infinitely more free
afloat than it had ever been on land.
Up and down the rivers the story went that the _Cotton Blossom_ was the
sternest-disciplined, best-managed, and most generously provisioned boat
in the business. And it was notorious that a sign back-stage and in each
dressing room read: “No lady of the company allowed on deck in a
wrapper.” It also was known that drunkenness on the _Cotton Blossom_ was
punished by instant dismissal; that Mrs. Captain Andy Hawks was a holy
terror; that the platters of fried chicken on Sunday were inexhaustible.
All of this was true.
Magnolia’s existence became a weird mixture of lawlessness and order; of
humdrum and fantasy. She slipped into the life as though she had been
born to it. Parthy alone kept her from being utterly spoiled by the
members of the troupe.
Mrs. Hawks’ stern tread never adjusted itself to the leisurely rhythm of
the show boat’s tempo. This was obvious even to Magnolia. The very first
week of their initial trip she had heard her mother say briskly to
Julie, “What time is it?” Mrs. Hawks was marching from one end of the
boat to the other, intent on some fell domestic errand of her own.
Julie, seated in a low chair on deck, sewing and gazing out upon the
yellow turbulence of the Mississippi, had replied in her deep indolent
voice, without glancing up, “What does it matter?”
The four words epitomized the divinely care-free existence of the
_Cotton Blossom_ show-boat troupe.
Sometimes they played a new town every night. Sometimes, in regions that
were populous and that boasted a good back-country, they remained a
week. In such towns, as the boat returned year after year until it
became a recognized institution, there grew up between the show-boat
troupe and the townspeople a sort of friendly intimacy. They were warmly
greeted on their arrival; sped regretfully on their departure. They
almost never travelled at night. Usually they went to bed with the sound
of the water slap-slapping gently against the boat’s flat sides, and
proceeded down river at daybreak. This meant that constant warfare raged
between the steamboat crew of the _Mollie Able_ and the show-boat troupe
of the _Cotton Blossom_. The steamer crew, its work done, retired early,
for it must be up and about at daybreak. It breakfasted at four-thirty
or five. The actors never were abed before midnight or one o’clock and
rose for a nine o’clock breakfast. They complained that the steamer
crew, with its bells, whistles, hoarse shouts, hammerings, puffings, and
general to-do attendant upon casting off and getting under way, robbed
them of their morning sleep. The crew grumbled and cursed as it tried to
get a night’s rest in spite of the noise of the band, the departing
audience, the midnight sociability of the players who, still at high
tension after their night’s work, could not yet retire meekly to bed.
“Lot of damn scenery chewers,” growled the crew, turning in sleep.
“Filthy roustabouts,” retorted the troupers, disturbed at dawn. “Yell
because they can’t talk like human beings.”
They rarely mingled, except such members of the crew as played in the
band; and never exchanged civilities. This state of affairs lent spice
to an existence that might otherwise have proved too placid for comfort.
The bickering acted as a safety valve.
It all was, perhaps, the worst possible environment for a skinny,
high-strung, and sensitive little girl who was one-quarter French. But
Magnolia thrived on it. She had the solid and lumpy Puritanism of
Parthy’s presence to counteract the leaven of her volatile father. This
saved her from being utterly consumed.
The life was at once indolent and busy. Captain Andy, scurrying hither
and thither, into the town, up the river bank, rushing down the aisle at
rehearsal to squeak a false direction to the hard-working company,
driving off into the country to return in triumph laden with farm
produce, was fond of saying, “We’re just like one big happy family.”
Captain Andy knew and liked good food (the Frenchman in him). They ate
the best that the countryside afforded—not a great deal of meat in the
height of summer when they were, perhaps, playing the hot humid Southern
river towns, but plenty of vegetables and fruit—great melons bought
from the patch with the sun still hot on their rounded bulging sides,
and then chilled to dripping deliciousness before eating; luscious yams;
country butter and cream. They all drank the water dipped out of the
river on which they happened to be floating. They quaffed great
dippersful of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and even the turbid Missouri,
and seemed none the worse for it. At the stern was the settling barrel.
Here the river water, dipped up in buckets, was left to settle before
drinking. At the bottom of this receptacle, after it was three-quarters
empty, one might find a rich layer of Mississippi silt intermingled with
plummy odds and ends of every description including, sometimes, a
sizable catfish.
In everything but actual rehearsing and playing, Magnolia lived the life
of the company. The boat was their home. They ate, slept, worked, played
on it. The company must be prompt at meal time, at rehearsals, and at
the evening performances. There all responsibility ended for them.
Breakfast was at nine; and under Parthy’s stern régime this meant nine.
They were a motley lot as they assembled. In that bizarre setting the
homely, everyday garb of the men and women took on a grotesque aspect.
It was as though they were dressed for a part. As they appeared in the
dining room, singly, in couples, or in groups, with a cheerful or a dour
greeting, depending on the morning mood of each, an onlooker could think
only of the home life of the Vincent Crummleses. Having seen Elly the
night before as Miss Lenore La Verne in the golden curls, short skirts,
and wide-eyed innocence of Bessie, the backwoodsman’s daughter, who
turned out, in the last act, to be none other than the Lady Clarice
Trelawney, carelessly mislaid at birth, her appearance at breakfast was
likely to have something of the shock of disillusionment. The baby stare
of her great blue eyes was due to near-sightedness to correct which she
wore silver-rimmed spectacles when not under the public gaze. Her
breakfast jacket, though frilly, was not of the freshest, and her kid
curlers were not entirely hidden by a silk-and-lace cap. Elly was,
despite these grotesqueries, undeniably and triumphantly pretty, and
thus arrayed gave the effect of a little girl mischievously tricked out
in her grandmother’s wardrobe. Her husband, known as Schultzy in private
and Harold Westbrook on the bills, acted as director of the company. He
was what is known in actor’s parlance as a raver, and his method of
acting was designated in the show-boat world as spitting scenery. A
somewhat furtive young man in very tight pants and high collar always a
trifle too large. He was a cuff-shooter, and those cuffs were secured
and embellished with great square shiny chunks of quartz-like stuff
which he frequently breathed upon heavily and then rubbed with his
handkerchief. Schultzy played juvenile leads opposite his wife’s ingénue
rôles; had a real flair for the theatre.
Sometimes they were in mid-river when the breakfast bell sounded;
sometimes tied to a landing. The view might be plantation, woods, or
small town—it was all one to the _Cotton Blossom_ company, intent on
coffee and bacon. Long before white-aproned Jo, breakfast bell in hand,
emerged head first from the little doorway beneath the stage back of the
orchestra pit, like an amiable black python from its lair, Mrs. Hawks
was on the scene, squinting critically into cream jugs, attacking flies
as though they were dragons, infuriating Queenie with the remark that
the biscuits seemed soggy this morning. Five minutes after the bell was
brandished, Jo had placed the breakfast on the table, hot: oatmeal,
steaming pots of coffee, platters of fried eggs with ham or bacon,
stacks of toast, biscuits fresh from the oven. If you were prompt you
got a hot breakfast; tardy, you took it cold.
Parthy, whose breakfast cap, designed to hide her curl papers, always
gave the effect, somehow, of a martial helmet, invariably was first at
the small table that stood at the head of the room farthest from the
little doorway. So she must have sat at her schoolhouse desk during
those New England winters, awaiting the tardy morning arrival of
reluctant and chilblained urchins. Magnolia was one of those children
whom breakfast does not interest. Left to her own devices, she would
have ignored the meal altogether. She usually entered late, her black
hair still wet from the comb, her eyes wide with her eagerness to impart
the day’s first bit of nautical news.
“Doc says there’s a family going down river on a bumboat, and they’ve
got a teensy baby no bigger than a——”
“Drink your milk.”
“—doll and he says it must have been born on the boat and he bets it’s
not more than a week old. Oh, I hope they’ll tie up somewhere near——”
“Eat your toast with your egg.”
“Do I have to eat my egg?”
“Yes.”
If Magnolia was late, Andy was always later. He ate quickly and
abstractedly. As he swallowed his coffee you could almost see his agile
mind darting here and there, so that you wondered how his electric
little body resisted following it as a lesser force follows a
greater—up into the pilot house, down in the engine room, into the
town, leaping ahead to the next landing; dickering with storekeepers for
supplies. He was always the first to finish and was off at a quick trot,
clawing the mutton-chop whiskers as he went.
Early or late, Julie and Steve came in together, Steve’s great height
ludicrously bent to avoid the low rafters of the dining room. Julie and
Steve were the character team—Julie usually cast as adventuress, older
sister, foil for Elly, the ingénue. Julie was a natural and intuitive
actress, probably the best in the company. Sometimes she watched Elly’s
unintelligent work, heard her slovenly speech and her silly inflections,
and a little contemptuous look would come into her face.
Steve played villains and could never have kept the job, even in that
uncritical group, had it not been for Julie. He was very big and very
fair, and almost entirely lacking in dramatic sense. A quiet gentle
giant, he always seemed almost grotesquely miscast, his blondeur and his
trusting faithful blue eyes belying the sable hirsuteness of villainy.
Julie coached him patiently, tirelessly. The result was fairly
satisfactory. But a nuance, an inflection, was beyond him.
“Who has a better right!” his line would be, perhaps. Schultzy,
directing at rehearsal, would endeavour fruitlessly to convey to him its
correct reading. After rehearsal, Julie could be heard going over the
line again and again.
“Who has a better _right_!” Steve would thunder, dramatically.
“No, dear. The accent is on ‘better.’ Like this: ‘Who has a _better_
right!’”
Steve’s blue eyes would be very earnest, his face red with effort. “Oh,
I see. Come down hard on ‘better,’ huh? ‘Who has a better _right_!’”
It was useless.
The two were very much in love. The others in the company sometimes
teased them about this, but not often. Julie and Steve did not respond
to this badinage gracefully. There existed between the two a relation
that made the outsider almost uncomfortable. When they looked at each
other, there vibrated between them a current that sent a little shiver
through the beholder. Julie’s eyes were deep-set and really black, and
there was about them a curious indefinable quality. Magnolia liked to
look into their soft and mournful depths. Her own eyes were dark, but
not like Julie’s. Perhaps it was the whites of Julie’s eyes that were
different.
Magnolia had once seen them kiss. She had come upon them quietly and
unexpectedly, on deck, in the dusk. Certainly she had never witnessed a
like passage of love between her parents; and even her recent
familiarity with stage romance had not prepared her for it. It was long
before the day of the motion picture fade-out. Olga Nethersole’s famous
osculation was yet to shock a Puritan America. Steve had held Julie a
long long minute, wordlessly. Her slimness had seemed to melt into him.
Julie’s eyes were closed. She was quite limp as he tipped her upright.
She stood thus a moment, swaying, her eyes still shut. When she opened
them they were clouded, misty, as were his. The two then beheld a
staring and fascinated little girl quite palpably unable to move from
the spot. Julie had laughed a little low laugh. She had not flushed,
exactly. Her sallow colouring had taken on a tone at once deeper and
clearer and brighter, like amber underlaid with gold. Her eyes had
widened until they were enormous in her thin dark glowing face. It was
as though a lamp had been lighted somewhere behind them.
“What makes you look like that?” Magnolia had demanded, being a
forthright young person.
“Like what?” Julie had asked.
“Like you do. All—all shiny.”
“Love,” Julie had answered, quite simply. Magnolia had not in the least
understood; but she remembered. And years later she did understand.
Besides Elly, the ingénue, Schultzy, juvenile lead, Julie and Steve,
character team, there were Mr. and Mrs. Means, general business team,
Frank, the heavy, and Ralph, general utility man. Elly and Schultzy sat
at table with the Hawkses, the mark of favour customary to their lofty
theatrical eminence. The others of the company, together with Doc, and
three of the band members, sat at the long table in the centre of the
room. Mrs. Means played haughty dowagers, old Kentucky crones, widows,
mothers, and middle-aged females. Mr. Means did bankers, Scrooges, old
hunters and trappers, comics, and the like.
At the table nearest the door and the kitchen sat the captain and crew
of the _Mollie Able_. There were no morning newspapers to read between
sips of coffee; no mail to open. They were all men and women of
experience. They had knocked about the world. In their faces was a lived
look, together with an expression that had in it a curiously childlike
quality. Captain Andy was not far wrong in his boast that they were like
one big family—a close and jealous family needing no outside stimulus
for its amusement. They were extraordinarily able to amuse themselves.
Their talk was racy, piquant, pungent. The women were, for the most
part, made of sterner stuff than the men—that is, among the actors.
That the men had chosen this drifting, care-free, protected life, and
were satisfied with it, proved that. Certainly Julie was a force
stronger than Steve; Elly made a slave of Schultzy; Mrs. Means was a
sternly maternal wife to her weak-chested and drily humorous little
husband.
Usually they lingered over their coffee. Jo, padding in from the
kitchen, would bring on a hot potful.
Julie had a marmoset which she had come by in New Orleans, where it had
been brought from equatorial waters by some swarthy earringed sailor.
This she frequently carried to the table with her, tucked under her arm,
its tiny dark head with the tragic mask of a face peering out from
beneath her elbow. To Mrs. Hawks’ intense disgust, Julie fed the tiny
creature out of her own dish. In her cabin its bed was an old sealskin
muff from whose depths its mournful dark eyes looked appealingly out
from a face that was like nothing so much as that of an old old baby.
“I declare,” Parthy would protest, almost daily, “it fairly turns a
body’s stomach to see her eating out of the same dish with that dirty
little rat.”
“Why, Mama! it isn’t a rat any such thing! It’s a monkey and you know
it. Julie says maybe Schultzy can get one for me in New Orleans if I
promise to be very very careful of it.”
“I’d like to see her try,” grimly putting an end to that dream.
The women took care of their own cabins. The detail of this occupied
them until mid-morning. Often there was a rehearsal at ten that lasted
an hour or more. Schultzy announced it at breakfast.
As they swept up a river, or floated down, their approach to the town
was announced by the shrill iron-throated calliope, pride of Captain
Andy’s heart. Its blatant voice heralded the coming of the show boat
long before the boat itself could be seen from the river bank. It had
solid brass keys and could plainly be heard for five miles. George, who
played the calliope, was also the pianist. He was known, like all
calliope players, as the Whistler. Magnolia delighted in watching him at
the instrument. He wore a slicker and a slicker hat and heavy gloves to
protect his hands, for the steam of the whistles turned to hot raindrops
and showered his hands and his head and shoulders as he played. As they
neared the landing, the band, perched atop the show boat, forward,
alternated with the calliope. From the town, hurrying down the streets,
through the woods, dotting the levee and the landing, came eager
figures, black and white. Almost invariably some magic-footed Negro,
overcome by the music, could be seen on the wharf executing the
complicated and rhythmic steps of a double shuffle, his rags flapping
grotesquely about him, his mouth a gash of white. By nine o’clock in the
morning every human being within a radius of five miles knew that the
Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre had docked at the waterfront.
By half-past eleven the band, augmented by two or three men of the
company who doubled in brass, must be ready for the morning concert on
the main street corner. Often, queerly enough, the town at which they
made their landing was no longer there. The Mississippi, in prankish
mood, had dumped millions of tons of silt in front of the street that
faced the river. Year by year, perhaps, this had gone on, until now that
which had been a river town was an inland town, with a mile of woodland
and sandy road between its main street and the waterfront. The old
serpent now stretched its sluggish yellow coils in another channel.
By eleven o’clock the band would have donned its scarlet coats with the
magnificent gold braid and brass buttons. The nether part of these
costumes always irritated Magnolia. Her colour-loving eye turned away
from them, offended. For while the upper costume was splendidly martial,
the lower part was composed merely of such everyday pants as the band
members might be wearing at the time of the concert hour, and were a
rude shock to the ravished eye as it travelled from the gay flame and
gold of the jacket and the dashing impudence of the cap. Especially in
the drum major did this offend her. He was called the baton spinner and
wore, instead of the scarlet cap of the other band members, an imposing
(though a slightly mangy) fur shako, very black and shaggy and
fierce-looking, and with a strap under the chin. Pete, the bass drummer,
worked in the engine room. Usually, at the last minute, he washed up
hastily, grabbed his drum, buttoned on his coat, and was dazzlingly
transformed from a sooty crow into a scarlet tanager.
Up the levee they scrambled—two cornets, a clarinet, a tuba, an alto
(called a peck horn. Magnolia loved its ump-a ump-a ta-ta-ta-ta, ump-a
ump-a ta-ta-ta-ta), a snare drummer who was always called a “sticks,”
and the bass drum, known as the bull.