words. With her, to threaten was to act. That very morning, just before
the _Cotton Blossom_ was making a late departure from Greenville, where
they had played the night before, to Sunnisie Side Landing, twelve miles
below, this formidable woman, armed with hammer and nails, took
advantage of Windy’s temporary absence below decks to nail down the
hatch above the steps leading to the pilot house. She was the kind of
woman who can drive a nail straight. She drove ten of them, long and
firm and deep. A pity that no one saw her. It was a sight worth seeing,
this accomplished and indomitable virago in curl papers, driving nails
with a sure and steady stroke.
Below stairs Windy, coming aboard from an early morning look around,
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, sank his great yellow fangs into a
generous wedge of Honest Scrap, and prepared to climb the stairs to the
_Cotton Blossom_ pilot house, there to manipulate wheel and cord that
would convey his orders to Pete in the engine room.
Up the stairs, leaving a mud spoor behind. One hand raised to lift the
hatch; wondering, meanwhile, to find it closed. A mighty heave; a
pounding with the great fist; another heave, then, with the powerful old
shoulder.
“Nailed,” said Windy aloud to himself, mildly. Then, still mildly, “The
old hell-cat.” He spat, then, on the hatchway steps and clumped
leisurely down again. He leaned over the boat rail, looking benignly
down at the crowd of idlers gathered at the wharf to watch the show boat
cast off. Then he crossed the deck again to where a capacious and
carpet-seated easy chair held out its inviting arms. Into this he sank
with a grunt of relaxation. From his pocket he took the pipe so recently
relinquished, filled it, tamped it, lighted it. From another pocket he
took a month-old copy of the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_, turned to the
column marked Shipping News, and settled down, apparently, for a long
quiet day with literature.
Up came the anchor. In came the hawser. Chains clanked. The sound of the
gangplank drawn up. The hoarse shouts from land and water that always
attend the departure of a river boat. “Throw her over there! Lift ’er!
Heh, Pete! Gimme hand here! Little to the left. Other side! Hold on!
Easy!”
The faces of the crowd ashore turned expectantly toward the boat.
Everything shipshape. Pete in the engine room. Captain Andy scampering
for the texas. Silence. No bells. No steam. No hoarse shouts of command.
God A’mighty, where’s Windy? Windy! Windy!
Windy lowers his shielding newspaper and mildly regards the capering
captain and bewildered crew and startled company. He is wearing his
silver-rimmed reading spectacles slightly askew on his biblical-looking
hooked nose. Andy rushes up to him, all the Basque in him bubbling.
“God’s sake, Windy, what’s . . . why don’t you take her! We’re going.”
Windy chewed rhythmically for a moment, spat a long brown jet of juice,
wiped his hairy mouth with the back of one gnarled hand. “We ain’t
going, Cap’n Hawks, because she can’t go till I give her the go-ahead.
And I ain’t give her the go-ahead. I’m the pilot of this here boat.”
“But why? What the . . . Wh——”
“The hatch is nailed down above the steps leading to the pilot house,
Cap’n Andy. Till that hatchway’s open, I don’t climb up to no pilot
house. And till I climb up to the pilot house, she don’t get no
go-ahead. And till I give her the go-ahead, she don’t go, not if we stay
here alongside this landing till the _Cotton Blossom_ rots.”
He looked around benignly and resumed his reading of the New Orleans
_Times-Democrat_.
Profanity, frowned upon under Parthy’s régime, now welled up in Andy and
burst from him in spangled geysers. Words seethed to the surface and
exploded like fireworks. Twenty-five years of river life had equipped
him with a vocabulary rich, varied, purple. He neglected neither the
heavens above nor the earth beneath. Revolt and rage shook his wiry
little frame. Years of henpecking, years of natural gaiety suppressed,
years of mincing when he wished to stride, years of silence when he
wished to sing, now were wiped away by the stream of undiluted rage that
burst from Captain Andy Hawks. It was a torrent, a flood, a Mississippi
of profanity in which hells and damns were mere drops in the mighty
roaring mass.
“Out with your crowbars there. Pry up that hatch! I’m captain of this
boat, by God, and anybody, man or woman, who nails down that hatch again
without my orders gets put off this boat wherever we are, and so I say.”
Did Parthenia Ann Hawks shrink and cower and pale under the blinding
glare of this pyrotechnic profanity? Not that indomitable woman. The
picture of outraged virtue in curl papers, she stood her ground like a
Roman matron. She had even, when the flood broke, sent Magnolia indoors
with a gesture meant to convey protection from the pollution of this
verbal stream.
“Well, Captain Hawks, a fine example you have set for your company and
crew I must say.”
“_You_ must say! You——! Let me tell you, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am, the less
you say the better. And I repeat, anybody touches that hatchway
again——”
“Touch it!” echoed Parthy in icy disdain. “I wouldn’t touch it, nor the
pilot house, nor the pilot either, if you’ll excuse my saying so, with a
ten-foot pole.”
And swept away with as much dignity as a _Cotton Blossom_ early morning
costume would permit. Her head bloody but unbowed.
VII
Julie was gone. Steve was gone. Tragedy had stalked into Magnolia’s
life; had cast its sable mantle over the _Cotton Blossom_. Pete had kept
his promise and revenge had been his. But the taste of triumph had not,
after all, been sweet in his mouth. There was little of the peace of
satisfaction in his sooty face stuck out of the engine-room door. The
arm that beat the ball drum in the band was now a listless member, so
that a hollow mournful thump issued from that which should have given
forth a rousing boom.
The day the _Cotton Blossom_ was due to play Lemoyne, Mississippi, Julie
Dozier took sick. In show-boat troupes, as well as in every other
theatrical company in the world, it is an unwritten law that an actor
must never be too sick to play. He may be sick. Before the performance
he may be too sick to stand; immediately after the performance he may
collapse. He may, if necessary, die on the stage and the curtain will
then be lowered. But no real trouper while conscious will ever confess
himself too sick to go on when the overture ends and the lights go down.
Julie knew this. She had played show boats for years, up and down the
rivers of the Middle West and the South. She had a large and loyal
following. Lemoyne was a good town, situated on the river, prosperous,
sizable.
Julie lay on her bed in her darkened room, refusing all offers of aid.
She did not want food. She did not want cold compresses on her head. She
did not want hot compresses on her head. She wanted to be left
alone—with Steve. Together the two stayed in the darkened room, and
when some member of the company came to the door with offers of aid or
comfort, there came into their faces a look that was strangely like one
of fear, followed immediately by a look of relief.
Queenie sent Jo to the door with soup, her panacea for all ailments,
whether of the flesh or the spirit. Julie made a show of eating it, but
when Jo had clumped across the stage and down to his kitchen Julie
motioned to Steve. He threw the contents of the bowl out of the window
into the yellow waters of the Mississippi.
Doc appeared at Julie’s door for the tenth time though it was only
mid-morning. “Think you can play all right, to-night, though, don’t you,
Julie?”
In the semi-darkness of her shaded room Julie’s eyes glowed suddenly
wide and luminous. She sat up in bed, pushing her hair back from her
forehead with a gesture so wild as to startle the old trouper.
“No!” she cried, in a sort of terror. “No! I can’t play to-night. Don’t
ask me.”
Blank astonishment made Doc’s face almost ludicrous. For an actress to
announce ten hours before the time set for the curtain’s rising that she
would not be able to go on that evening—an actress who had not suffered
decapitation or an amputation—was a thing unheard of in Doc’s
experience.
“God a’mighty, Julie! If you’re sick as all that, you’d better see a
doctor. Steve, what say?”
The great blond giant seated at the side of Julie’s bed did not look
round at his questioner. His eyes were on Julie’s face. “Julie’s funny
that way. She’s set against doctors. Won’t have one, that’s all. Don’t
coax her. It’ll only make her worse.”
Inured as he was to the vagaries of woman, this apparently was too much
for Doc. Schultzy appeared in the doorway; peered into the dimness of
the little room.
“Funny thing. I guess you must have an admirer in this town, Jule.
Somebody’s stole your picture, frame and all, out of the layout in the
lobby there. First I thought it might be that crazy Pete, used to be so
stuck on you. . . . Now, now, Steve! Keep your shirt on! Keep your shirt
on! . . . I asked him, straight, but he was surprised all right. He
ain’t good enough actor to fool me. He didn’t do it. Must be some town
rube all right, Julie, got stuck on your shape or something. I put up
another one.” He stood a moment, thoughtfully. Elly came up behind him,
hatted and gloved.
“I’m going up to town, Julie. Can I fetch you something? An orange,
maybe? Or something from the drug store?”
Julie’s head on the pillow moved a negative. “She says no, thanks,”
Steve answered for her, shortly. It was as though both laboured under a
strain. The three in the doorway sensed it. Elly shrugged her shoulders,
though whether from pique or indifference it was hard to say. Doc still
stood puzzled, bewildered. Schultzy half turned away. “S’long’s you’re
all right by to-night,” he said cheerfully.
“Says she won’t be,” Doc put in, lowering his voice.
“Won’t be!” repeated Schultzy, almost shrilly. “Why, she ain’t _sick_,
is she! I mean, sick!”
Schultzy sent his voice shrilling from Julie’s little bedroom doorway
across the bare stage, up the aisles of the empty auditorium, so that it
penetrated the box office at the far end of the boat, where Andy, at the
ticket window, was just about to be relieved by Parthy.
“Heh, Cap! Cap! Come here. Julie’s sick. Julie’s too sick to go on. Says
she’s too sick to . . .”
“Here,” said Andy, summarily, to Parthy; and left her in charge of
business. Down the aisle with the light quick step that was almost a
scamper; up the stage at a bound. “Best advance sale we’ve had since we
started out. We never played this town before. License was too high. But
here it is, not eleven o’clock, and half the house gone already.” He
peered into the darkened room.
From its soft fur nest in the old sealskin muff the marmoset poked its
tragic mask and whimpered like a sick baby. This morning there was a
strange resemblance between the pinched and pathetic face on the pillow
and that of the little sombre-eyed monkey.
By now there was quite a little crowd about Julie’s door. Mis’ Means had
joined them and could be heard murmuring about mustard plasters and a
good hot something or other. Andy entered the little room with the
freedom of an old friend. He looked sharply down at the face on the
pillow. The keen eyes plunged deep into the tortured eyes that stared
piteously up at him. Something he saw there caused him to reach out with
one brown paw, none too immaculate, and pat that other slim brown hand
clutching the coverlet so tensely. “Why, Jule, what’s—— Say, s’pose
you folks clear out and let me and Jule and Steve here talk things over
quiet. Nobody ain’t going to get well with this mob scene you’re putting
on. Scat!” Andy could distinguish between mental and physical anguish.
They shifted—Doc, Elly, Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Catchem the torpid.
Another moment and they would have moved reluctantly away. But Parthy,
torn between her duty at the ticket window and her feminine curiosity as
to the cause of the commotion at Julie’s door became, suddenly, all
woman. Besides—demon statistician that she was—she suddenly had
remembered a curious coincidence in connection with this sudden illness
of Julie’s. She slammed down the ticket window, banged the box-office
door, sailed down the aisle. As she approached Doc was saying for the
dozenth time:
“Person’s too sick to play, they’re sick enough to have a doctor’s what
I say. Playing Xenia to-morrow. Good a stand’s we got. Prolly won’t be
able to open there, neither, if you’re sick’s all that.”
“I’ll be able to play to-morrow!” cried Julie, in a high strained voice.
“I’ll be able to play to-morrow. To-morrow I’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?” demanded Doc.
Steve turned on him in sudden desperation. “She’ll be all right, I tell
you. She’ll be all right as soon as she gets out of this town.”
“That’s a funny thing,” exclaimed Parthy. She swept through the little
crowd at the door, seeming to mow them down with the energy of her
progress. “That’s a funny thing.”
“What?” demanded Steve, his tone belligerent. “What’s funny?”
Captain Andy raised a placating palm. “Now, Parthy, now, Parthy. Sh-sh!”
“Don’t shush _me_, Hawks. I know what I’m talking about. It came over me
just this minute. Julie took sick at this very town of Lemoyne time we
came down river last year. Soon as you and Doc decided we wouldn’t open
here because the license was too high she got well all of a sudden, just
like that!” She snapped a thumb and forefinger.
Silence, thick, uncomfortable, heavy with foreboding, settled down upon
the little group in the doorway.
“Nothing so funny about that,” said Captain Andy, stoutly; and threw a
sharp glance at the face on the pillow. “This hot sticky climate down
here after the cold up north is liable to get anybody to feeling queer.
None too chipper myself, far’s that goes. Affects some people that way.”
He scratched frenziedly at the mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that.
“Well, I may not know _much_——” began Parthy.
Down the aisle skimmed Magnolia, shouting as she came, her child’s voice
high and sharp with excitement. “Mom! Mom! Look. What do you think!
Julie’s picture’s been stolen again right out of the front of the lobby.
Julie, they’ve taken your picture again. Somebody took one and Schultzy
put another in and now it’s been stolen too.”
She was delighted with her news; radiant with it. Her face fell a little
at the sight of the figure on the bed, the serious group about the
doorway that received her news with much gravity. She flew to the bed
then, all contrition. “Oh, Julie darling, I’m so sorry you’re sick.”
Julie turned her face away from the child, toward the wall.
Captain Andy, simulating fury, capered a threatening step toward the
doorway crowd now increased by the deprecating figure of Mr. Means and
Ralph’s tall shambling bulk. “Will you folks clear out of here or will I
have to use force! A body’d think a girl didn’t have the right to feel
sick. Doc, you get down and ’tend to that ticket window, or Parthy. If
we can’t show to-night we got to leave ’em know. Ralph, you write out a
sign and get it pasted up at the post office. . . . Sure you won’t be
feeling better by night time, are you, Julie?” He looked doubtfully down
at the girl on the bed.
With a sudden lithe movement Julie flung herself into Steve’s arms,
clung to him, weeping. “No!” she cried, her voice high, hysterical. “No!
No! No! Leave me alone, can’t you! Leave me alone!”
“Sure,” Andy motioned, then, fiercely to the company. “Sure we’ll leave
you alone, Julie.”
But Tragedy, having stalked her victim surely, relentlessly, all the
morning, now was about to close in upon her. She had sent emissary after
emissary down the show-boat aisle, and each had helped to deepen the
look of terror in Julie’s eyes. Now sounded the slow shambling heavy
tread of Windy the pilot, bearded, sombre, ominous as the figure of fate
itself. The little group turned toward him automatically, almost
absurdly, like a badly directed mob scene in one of their own improbable
plays.
He clumped up the little flight of steps that led from the lower
left-hand box to the stage. Clump, clump, clump. Irresistibly Parthy’s
eyes peered sharply in pursuit of the muddy tracks that followed each
step. She snorted indignantly. Across the stage, his beard waggling up
and down as his jaws worked slowly, rhythmically on a wedge of Honest
Scrap. As he approached Julie’s doorway he took off his cap and rubbed
his pate with his palm, sure sign of great mental perturbation in this
monumental old leviathan. The yellow skin of his knobby bald dome-like
head shone gold in the rays of the late morning sun that came in through
the high windows at the side of the stage.
He stood a moment, chewing, and peering mildly into the dimness of the
bedroom, Sphinx-like, it seemed that he never would speak. He stood,
champing. The _Cotton Blossom_ troupe waited. They had not played
melodrama for years without being able to sense it when they saw it. He
spoke. “Seems that skunk Pete’s up to something.” They waited. The long
tobacco-stained beard moved up and down, up and down. “Skinned out half
an hour back streaking toward town like possessed. He yanked that
picture of Julie out of the hall there. Seen him. I see good deal goes
on around here.”
Steve sprang to his feet with a great ripping river oath. “I’ll kill him
this time, the ——”
“Seen you take that first picture out, Steve.” The deep red that had
darkened Steve’s face and swelled the veins on his great neck receded
now, leaving his china-blue eyes staring out of a white and stricken
face.
“I never did! I never did!”
Julie sat up, clutching her wrapper at the throat. She laughed shrilly.
“What would he want to steal my picture for! His own wife’s picture.
Likely!”
“So nobody in this town’d see it, Julie,” said Windy, mildly. “Listen.
Fifty years piloting on the rivers you got to have pretty good eyesight.
Mine’s as good to-day as it was time I was twenty. I just stepped down
from the texas to warn you I see Pete coming along the levee with Ike
Keener. Ike’s the sheriff. He’ll be in here now any minute.”
“Let him,” Andy said, stoutly. “Our license is paid. Sheriff’s as
welcome around this boat as anybody. Let him.”
But no one heard him; no one heeded him. A strange and terrible thing
was happening. Julie had sprung from her bed. In her white nightgown and
her wrapper, her long black hair all tumbled and wild about her face, a
stricken and hunted thing, she clung to Steve, and he to her. There came
a pounding at the door that led into the show-boat auditorium from the
fore deck. Steve’s eyes seemed suddenly to sink far back in his head.
His cheek-bones showed gaunt and sharp as Julie’s own. His jaw was set
so that a livid ridge stood out on either side like bars of white-hot
steel. He loosened Julie’s hold almost roughly. From his pocket he
whipped a great clasp-knife and opened its flashing blade. Julie did not
scream, but the other women did, shriek on shriek. Captain Andy sprang
for him, a mouse attacking a mastodon. Steve shook him off with a fling
of his powerful shoulders.
“I’m not going to hurt her, you fool. Leave me be. I know what I’m
doing.” The pounding came again, louder and more insistent. “Somebody go
down and let him in—but keep him there a minute.”
No one stirred. The pounding ceased. The doors opened. The boots of Ike
Keener, the sheriff, clattered down the aisle of the _Cotton Blossom_.
“Stop those women screeching,” Steve shouted. Then, to Julie, “It won’t
hurt much, darling.” With incredible swiftness he seized Julie’s hand in
his left one and ran the keen glittering blade of his knife firmly
across the tip of her forefinger. A scarlet line followed it. He bent
his blond head, pressed his lips to the wound, sucked it greedily. With
a little moan Julie fell back on the bed. Steve snapped the blade into
its socket, thrust the knife into his pocket. The boots of Sheriff Ike
Keener were clattering across the stage now. The white faces clustered
in the doorway—the stricken, bewildered, horrified faces—turned from
the two within the room to the one approaching it. They made way for
this one silently. Even Parthy was dumb. Magnolia clung to her,
wide-eyed, uncomprehending, sensing tragedy though she had never before
encountered it.
The lapel of his coat flung back, Ike Keener confronted the little cowed
group on the stage. A star shone on his left breast. The scene was like
a rehearsal of a _Cotton Blossom_ thriller.
“Who’s captain of this here boat?”
Andy, his fingers clutching his whiskers, stepped forward. “I am. What’s
wanted with him? Hawks is my name—Captain Andy Hawks, twenty years on
the rivers.”
He looked the sheriff of melodrama, did Ike Keener—boots, black
moustaches, wide-brimmed black hat, flowing tie, high boots, and all.
Steve himself, made up for the part, couldn’t have done it better.
“Well, Cap, kind of unpleasant, but I understand there’s a miscegenation
case on board.”
“What?” whispered Magnolia. “What’s that? What does he mean, Mom?”
“Hush!” hissed Parthy, and jerked the child’s arm.
“How’s that?” asked Andy, but he knew.
“Miscegenation. Case of a Negro woman married to a white man. Criminal
offense in this state, as you well know.”
“No such thing,” shouted Andy. “No such thing on board this boat.”
Sheriff Ike Keener produced a piece of paper. “Name of the white man is
Steve Baker. Name of the negress”—he squinted again at the slip of
paper—“name of the negress is Julie Dozier.” He looked around at the
group. “Which one’s them?”
“Oh, my God!” screamed Elly. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“Shut up,” said Schultzy, roughly.
Steve stepped to the window and threw up the shade, letting the morning
light into the crowded disorderly little cubicle. On the bed lay Julie,
her eyes enormous in her sallow pinched face.
“I’m Steve Baker. This is my wife.”
Sheriff Ike Keener tucked the paper in his pocket. “You two better dress
and come along with me.”
Julie stood up. She looked an old woman. The marmoset whimpered and
whined in his fur nest. She put out a hand, automatically, and plucked
it from the muff and held it in the warm hollow of her breast. Her great
black eyes stared at the sheriff like the wide-open unseeing eyes of a
sleep walker.
Steve Baker grinned—rather, his lips drew back from his teeth in a
horrid semblance of mirth. He threw a jovial arm about Julie’s shrinking
shoulder. For once she had no need to coach him in his part. He looked
Ike Keener in the eye. “You wouldn’t call a man a white man that’s got
Negro blood in him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t; not in Mississippi. One drop of nigger blood makes you
a nigger in these parts.”
“Well, I got more than a drop of—nigger blood in me, and that’s a fact.
You can’t make miscegenation out of that.”
“You ready to swear to that in a court of law?”
“I’ll swear to it any place. I’ll swear it now.” Steve took a step
forward, one hand outstretched. “I’ll do more than that. Look at all
these folks here. There ain’t one of them but can swear I got Negro
blood in me this minute. That’s how white I am.”
Sheriff Ike Keener swept the crowd with his eye. Perhaps what he saw in
their faces failed to convince him. “Well, I seen fairer men than you
was niggers. Still, you better tell that——”
Mild, benevolent, patriarchal, the figure of old Windy stepped out from
among the rest. “Guess you’ve known me, Ike, better part of twenty-five
years. I was keelboatin’ time you was runnin’ around, a barefoot on the
landin’. Now I’m tellin’ you—me, Windy McKlain—that that white man
there’s got nigger blood in him. I’ll take my oath to that.”
Having thus delivered himself of what was, perhaps, the second longest
speech in his career, he clumped off again, across the stage, down the
stairs, up the aisle, looking, even in that bizarre environment, like
something out of Genesis.
Sheriff Ike Keener was frankly puzzled. “If it was anybody else but
Windy—but I got this straight from—from somebody ought to know.”
“From who?” shouted Andy, all indignation. “From a sooty-faced scab of a
bull-drumming engineer named Pete. And why? Because he’s been stuck on
Julie here I don’t know how long, and she wouldn’t have anything to do
with him.”
“Is that right?”