the company’ll bear me out. He wouldn’t leave her alone, though she
hated the sight of him, and Cap here give him a talking—didn’t you,
Cap? So finally, when he wouldn’t quit, then there was nothing for it
but lick him, and I licked him good, and soused him in the river to get
his dirty face clean. He crawls out swearing he’ll get me for it. Now
you know.”
Keener now addressed himself to Julie for the first time. “He says—this
Pete—that you was born here in Lemoyne, and that your pop was white and
your mammy black. That right?”
Julie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she said.
“That’s—right.”
A sudden commotion in the group that had been so still. Elly’s voice,
shrill with hysteria. “I will! I’ll tell right out. The wench! The lying
black——”
Suddenly stifled, as though a hand had been clapped none too gently
across her mouth. Incoherent blubberings; a scuffle. Schultzy had picked
Elly up like a sack of meal, one hand still firmly held over her mouth;
had carried her into her room and slammed the door.
“What’s she say?” inquired Keener.
Again Andy stepped into the breach. “That’s our ingénue lead. She’s kind
of high strung. You see, she’s been friends with this—with Julie
Dozier, here—without knowing about her—about her blood, and like that.
Kind of give her a shock, I guess. Natural.”
It was plain that Sheriff Ike Keener was on the point of departure,
puzzled though convinced. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, scratched
his head, replaced the hat at an angle that spelled bewilderment. His
eye, as he turned away, fell on the majestic figure of Parthenia Ann
Hawks, and on Magnolia cowering, wide-eyed, in the folds of her mother’s
ample skirts.
“You look like a respectable woman, ma’am.”
Imposing enough at all times, Parthy now grew visibly taller. Cold
sparks flew from her eyes. “I am.”
“That your little girl?”
Andy did the honours. “My wife, Sheriff. My little girl, Magnolia. What
do you say to the Sheriff, Magnolia?”
Thus urged, Magnolia spoke that which had been seething within her.
“You’re bad!” she shouted, her face twisted with the effort to control
her tears. “You’re a bad mean man, that’s what! You called Julie names
and made her look all funny. You’re a——”
The maternal hand stifled her.
“If I was you, ma’am, I wouldn’t bring up no child on a boat like this.
No, nor stay on it, neither. Fine place to rear a child!”
Whereupon, surprisingly enough, Parthy turned defensive. “My child’s as
well brought up as your own, and probably better, and so I tell you. And
I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself, Mr. Sheriff.”
“Parthy! Parthy!” from the alarmed Andy.
But Sheriff Ike Keener was a man of parts. “Well, women folks are all
alike. I’ll be going. I kind of smell a nigger in the woodpile here in
more ways than one. But I’ll take your word for it.” He looked Captain
Andy sternly in the eye. “Only let me tell you this, Captain Hawks. You
better not try to give your show in this town to-night. We got some
public-spirited folks here in Lemoyne and this fix you’re in has kind of
leaked around. You go to work and try to give your show with this mixed
blood you got here and first thing you know you’ll be riding out of town
on something don’t sit so easy as a boat.”
His broad-brimmed hat at an angle of authority, his coat tails flirting
as he strode, he marched up the aisle then and out.
The little huddling group seemed visibly to collapse. It was as though
an unseen hand had removed a sustaining iron support from the spine of
each. Magnolia would have flown to Julie, but Parthy jerked her back.
Whispering then; glance of disdain.
“Well, Julie, m’girl,” began Andy Hawks, kindly. Julie turned to him.
“We’re going,” she said, quietly.
The door of Elly’s room burst open. Elly, a rumpled, distraught,
unlovely figure, appeared in Julie’s doorway, Schultzy trying in vain to
placate her.
“You get out of here!” She turned in a frenzy to Andy. “She gets out of
here with that white trash she calls her husband or I go, and so I warn
you. She’s black! She’s black! God, I was a fool not to see it all the
time. Look at her, the nasty yellow——” A stream of abuse, vile,
obscene, born of the dregs of river talk heard through the years, now
welled to Elly’s lips, distorting them horribly.
“Come away from here,” Parthy said, through set lips, to Magnolia. And
bore the child, protesting, up the aisle and into the security of her
own room forward.
“I want to stay with Julie! I want to stay with Julie!” wailed Magnolia,
overwrought, as the inexorable hand dragged her up the stairs.
In her tiny disordered room Julie was binding up her wild hair with a
swift twist. She barely glanced at Elly. “Shut that woman up,” she said,
quietly. “Tell her I’m going.” She began to open boxes and drawers.
Steve approached Andy, low-voiced. “Cap, take us down as far as Xenia,
will you, for God’s sake! Don’t make us get off here.”
“Down as far as Xenia you go,” shouted Captain Andy at the top of his
voice, “and anybody in this company don’t like it they’re free to git,
bag and baggage, now. We’ll pull out of here now. Xenia by afternoon at
four, latest. And you two want to stay the night on board you’re
welcome. I’m master of this boat, by God!”
They left, these two, when the _Cotton Blossom_ docked at Xenia in the
late afternoon. Andy shook hands with them, gravely; and Windy clumped
down from the pilot house to perform the same solemn ceremony. You
sensed unseen peering eyes at every door and window of the _Cotton
Blossom_ and the _Mollie Able_.
“How you fixed for money?” Andy demanded, bluntly.
“We’re fixed all right,” Julie replied, quietly. Of the two of them she
was the more composed. “We’ve been saving. You took too good care of us
on the _Cotton Blossom_. No call to spend our money.” The glance from
her dark shadow-encircled eyes was one of utter gratefulness. She took
up the lighter pieces of luggage. Steve was weighed down with the
others—bulging boxes and carpet bags and bundles—their clothing and
their show-boat wardrobe and their pitifully few trinkets and personal
belongings. A pin cushion, very lumpy, that Magnolia had made for her at
Christmas a year ago. Photographs of the _Cotton Blossom_. A book of
pressed wild flowers. Old newspaper clippings.
Julie lingered. Steve crossed the gangplank, turned, beckoned with his
head. Julie lingered. An unspoken question in her eyes.
Andy flushed and scratched the mutton-chop whiskers this side and that.
“Well, you know how she is, Julie. She don’t mean no harm. But she
didn’t let on to Magnolia just what time you were going. Told her
to-morrow, likely. Women folks are funny, that way. She don’t mean no
harm.”
“That’s all right,” said Julie; picked up the valises, was at Steve’s
side. Together the two toiled painfully up the steep river bank, Steve
turning to aid her as best he could. They reached the top of the levee.
They stood a moment, breathless; then turned and trudged down the dusty
Southern country road, the setting sun in their faces. Julie’s slight
figure was bent under the weight of the burden she carried. You saw
Steve’s fine blond head turned toward her, tender, concerned,
encouraging.
Suddenly from the upper deck that fronted Magnolia’s room and Parthy’s
came the sound of screams, a scuffle, a smart slap, feet clattering
pell-mell down the narrow wooden balcony stairs. A wild little figure in
a torn white frock, its face scratched and tear-stained, its great eyes
ablaze in the white face, flew past Andy, across the gangplank, up the
levee, down the road. Behind her, belated and panting, came Parthy. Her
hand on her heart, her bosom heaving, she leaned against the inadequate
support offered by Andy’s right arm, threatening momentarily to topple
him, by her own dead weight, into the river.
“To think that I should live to see the day when—my own child—she
slapped me—her mother! I saw them out of the window, so I told her to
straighten her bureau drawers—a sight! All of a sudden she heard that
woman’s voice, low as it was, and she to the window. When she saw her
going she makes for the door. I caught her on the steps, but she was
like a wildcat, and raised her hand against me—her own mother—and tore
away, with me holding this in my hand.” She held out a fragment of torn
white stuff. “Raised her hand against her own——”
Andy grinned. “Good for her.”
“What say, Andy Hawks!”
But Andy refused to answer. His gaze followed the flying little figure
silhouetted against the evening sky at the top of the high river bank.
The slim sagging figure of the woman and the broad-shouldered figure of
the man trudged down the road ahead. The child’s voice could be heard
high and clear, with a note of hysteria in it. “Julie! Julie! Wait for
me! I want to say good-bye! Julie!”
The slender woman in the black dress turned and made as though to start
back and then, with a kind of crazy fear in her pace, began to run away
from the pursuing little figure—away from something that she had not
the courage to face. And when she saw this Magnolia ran on yet a little
while, faltering, and then she stopped and buried her head in her hands
and sobbed. The woman glanced over her shoulder, fearfully. And at what
she saw she dropped her bags and bundles in the road and started back
toward her, running fleetly in spite of her long ruffled awkward skirts;
and she held out her arms long before they were able to reach her. And
when finally they came together, the woman dropped on her knees in the
dust of the road and gathered the weeping child to her and held her
close, so that as you saw them sharply outlined against the sunset the
black of the woman’s dress and the white of the child’s frock were as
one.
VIII
Magnolia, at fifteen, was a gangling gawky child whose eyes were too big
for her face and whose legs were too long for her skirts. She looked, in
fact, all legs, eyes, and elbows. It was a constant race between her
knees and her skirt hems. Parthy was for ever lengthening frocks.
Frequently Magnolia, looking down at herself, was surprised, like Alice
in Wonderland after she had eaten the magic currant cake, to discover
how far away from her head her feet were. Being possessed of a natural
creamy pallor which her mother mistook for lack of red corpuscles, she
was dosed into chronic biliousness on cod liver oil, cream, eggs, and
butter, all of which she loathed. Then suddenly, at sixteen, legs,
elbows, and eyes assumed their natural proportions. Overnight,
seemingly, she emerged from adolescence a rather amazing looking young
creature with a high broad forehead, a wide mobile mouth, great dark
liquid eyes, and a most lovely speaking voice which nobody noticed. Her
dress was transformed, with Cinderella-like celerity, from the pinafore
to the bustle variety. She was not a beauty. She was, in fact,
considered rather plain by the unnoticing. Being hipless and almost
boyishly flat of bust in a day when the female form was a thing not only
of curves but of loops, she was driven by her mother into wearing all
sorts of pads and ruffled corset covers and contrivances which somehow
failed to conceal the slimness of the frame beneath. She was, even at
sixteen, what might be termed distinguished-looking. Merely by standing
tall, pale, dark-haired, next to Elly, that plump and pretty ingénue was
transformed into a dumpy and rather dough-faced blonde in whose
countenance selfishness and dissatisfaction were beginning to etch
telltale lines.
She had been now almost seven years on the show boat. These seven years
had spread a tapestry of life and colour before her eyes. Broad rivers
flowing to the sea. Little towns perched high on the river banks or
cowering flat and fearful, at the mercy of the waters that often crept
like hungry and devouring monsters, stealthily over the levee and into
the valley below. Singing Negroes. Fighting whites. Spawning Negroes. A
life fantastic, bizarre, peaceful, rowdy, prim, eventful, calm. On the
rivers anything might happen and everything did. She saw convict chain
gangs working on the roads. Grisly nightmarish figures of striped
horror, manacled leg to leg. At night you heard them singing plantation
songs in the fitful glare of their camp fires in the woods; simple songs
full of hope. Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel? they sang. Swing Low Sweet
Chariot, Comin’ for to Carry Me Home. In the Louisiana bayou country she
saw the Negroes perform that weird religious rite known as a ring shout,
semi-savage, hysterical, mesmerizing.
Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri small-town housewives came to be Magnolia’s
friends, and even Parthy’s. The coming of the show boat was the one
flash of blazing colour in the drab routine of their existence. To them
Schultzy was the John Drew of the rivers, Elly the Lillian Russell. You
saw them scudding down the placid tree-shaded streets in their morning
ginghams and calicoes, their bits of silver clasped in their work-seamed
hands, or knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. Fifty cents for two
seats at to-night’s show.
“How are you, Mis’ Hawks? . . . And the little girl? . . . My! Look at
the way she’s shot up in a year’s time! Well, you can’t call her little
girl any more. . . . I brought you a glass of my homemade damson
preserve. I take cup of sugar to cup of juice. Real rich, but it is good
if I do say so. . . . I told Will I was coming to the show every night
you were here, and he could like it or lump it. I been saving out of the
housekeeping money.”
They brought vast chocolate cakes; batches of cookies; jugs of
home-brewed grape wine; loaves of fresh bread; jars of strained honey;
stiff tight bunches of garden flowers. Offerings on the shrine of Art.
Periodically Parthy threatened to give up this roving life and take
Magnolia with her. She held this as a weapon over Andy’s head when he
crossed her will, or displeased her. Immediately boarding schools,
convents, and seminaries yawned for Magnolia.
Perhaps Parthy was right. “What kind of a life is this for a child!” she
demanded. And later, “A fine kind of a way for a young lady to be
living—slopping up and down these rivers, seeing nothing but loafers
and gamblers and niggers and worse. What about her Future?” Future, as
she pronounced it, was spelled with a capital F and was a thin disguise
for the word husband.
“Future’ll take care of itself,” Andy assured her, blithely.
“If that isn’t just like a man!”
It was inevitable that Magnolia should, sooner or later, find herself
through force of circumstance treading the boards as an actress in the
Cotton Blossom Floating Theatre company. Not only that, she found
herself playing ingénue leads. She had been thrown in as a stop-gap
following Elly’s defection, and had become, quite without previous
planning, a permanent member of the troupe. Strangely enough, she
developed an enormous following, though she lacked that saccharine
quality which river towns had come to expect in their show-boat
ingénues. True, her long legs were a little lanky beneath the short
skirts of the woodman’s pure daughter, but what she lacked in one
extremity she made up in another. They got full measure when they looked
at her eyes, and her voice made the small-town housewives weep. Yet when
their husbands nudged them, saying, “What you sniffling about?” they
could only reply, “I don’t know.” And no more did they.
Elly was twenty-eight when she deserted Schultzy for a gambler from
Mobile. For three years she had been restless, fault-finding,
dissatisfied. Each autumn she would announce to Captain Andy her
intention to forsake the rivers and bestow her talents ashore. During
the winter she would try to get an engagement through the Chicago
booking offices contrary to the custom of show-boat actors whose habit
it was to hibernate in the winter on the savings of a long and
economical summer. But the Chicago field was sparse and uncertain. She
never had the courage or the imagination to go as far as New York. April
would find her back on the _Cotton Blossom_. Between her and Schultzy
the bickerings and the quarrels became more and more frequent. She
openly defied Schultzy as he directed rehearsals. She refused to follow
his suggestions though he had a real sense of direction. Everything she
knew he had taught her. She invariably misread a line and had to be
coached in it, word by word; inflection; business; everything.
Yet now, when Schultzy said, “No! Listen. You been kidnapped and
smuggled on board this rich fella’s yacht, see. And he thinks he’s got
you in his power. He goes to grab you. You’re here, see. Then you point
toward the door back of him, see, like you saw something there scared
the life out of you. He turns around and you grab the gun off the table,
see, and cover him, and there’s your big speech. _So_ and so and _so_
and so and _so_ and so and _so_ and so——” the _ad lib._ directions
that have held since the day of Shakespeare.
Elly would deliberately defy him. Others in the company—new
members—began to take their cue from her.
She complained about her wardrobe; refused to interest herself in it,
though she had been an indefatigable needlewoman. Now, instead of
sewing, you saw her looking moodily out across the river, her hands
idle, her brows black. An unintelligent and unresourceful woman turned
moody and thoughtful must come to mischief, for within herself she finds
no solace.
At Mobile, then, she was gone. It was, they all knew, the
black-moustached gambler who had been following the show boat down the
river since they played Paducah, Kentucky. Elly had had dozens of
admirers in her show-boat career; had received much attention from
Southern gallants, gamblers, loafers, adventurers—all the romantic
beaux of the river towns of the ’80s. Her attitude toward them had been
puritanical to the point of sniffiness, though she had enjoyed their
homage and always displayed any amorous missives or gifts that came her
way.
True to the melodramatic tradition of her environment, she left a note
for Schultzy, written in a flourishing Spencerian hand that made up, in
part, for the spelling. She was gone. He need not try to follow her or
find her or bring her back. She was going to star at the head of her own
company and play Camille and even Juliet. He had promised her. She was
good and sick and tired of this everlasting flopping up and down the
rivers. She wouldn’t go back to it, no matter what. Her successor could
have her wardrobe. They had bookings through Iowa, Illinois, Missouri,
and Kansas. She might even get to New York. (Incredibly enough, she did
actually play Juliet through the Mid-west, to audiences of the
bewildered yokelry.) She was sorry to leave Cap in the lurch like this.
And she would close, and begged to remain his loving Wife (this inked
out but still decipherable)—begged to remain, his truly, Elly Chipley.
Just below this signature the added one of Lenore La Verne, done in
tremendous sable downstrokes and shaded curlecues, especially about the
L’s.
It was a crushing blow for Schultzy, who loved her. Stricken, he thought
only of her happiness. “She can’t get along without me,” he groaned.
Then, in a stunned way, “Juliet!” There was nothing of bitterness or
rancour in his tone; only a dumb despairing wonder. “Juliet! And she
couldn’t play Little Eva without making her out a slut.” He pondered
this a moment. “She’s got it into her head she’s Bernhardt, or
something. . . . Well, she’ll come back.”
“Do you mean to say you’d take her back!” Parthy demanded.
“Why, sure,” Schultzy replied, simply. “She never packed a trunk in her
life, or anything. I done all those things for her. Some ways she’s a
child. I guess that’s how she kept me so tight. She needed me all the
time. . . . Well, she’ll come back.”
Captain Andy sent to Chicago for an ingénue lead. It was then, pending
her arrival, that Magnolia stepped into the breach—the step being made,
incidentally, over what was practically Parthy’s dead body. For at
Magnolia’s calm announcement that she knew every line of the part and
all the business, her mother stormed, had hysterics, and finally took to
her bed (until nearly time for the rise of the curtain). The bill that
night was The Parson’s Bride. Show-boat companies to this day still tell
the story of what happened during that performance on the _Cotton
Blossom_.
They had two rehearsals, one in the morning, another that lasted
throughout the afternoon. Of the company, Magnolia was the calmest.
Captain Andy seemed to swing, by invisible pulleys, from the orchestra
pit below to Parthy’s chamber above. One moment he would be sprawled in
the kerosene footlights, his eyes deep in wrinkles of delight, his
little brown paws scratching the mutton-chop whiskers in a frenzy of
excitement.
“That’s right. That’s the stuff! Elly never give it half the——’Scuse
me, Schultzy—I didn’t go for to hurt your feelings, but by golly,
Nollie! I wouldn’t of believed you had it in you, not if your own mother
told——” Then, self-reminded, he would cast a fearful glance over his
shoulder, that shoulder would droop, he would extricate himself from the
welter of footlights and music racks and prompt books in which he
squatted, and scamper up the aisle. The dim outline of a female head in
curl papers certainly could not have been seen peering over the top of
the balcony rail as he fancied, for when he had clattered up the balcony
stairs and had gently turned the knob of the bedroom door, there lay the
curl-papered head on the pillow of the big bed, and from it issued
hollow groans, and plastered over one cheek of it was a large moist
white cloth soaked in some pungent and nostril-pricking stuff. The eyes
were closed. The whole figure was shaken by shivers. Mortal agony, you
would have said (had you not known Parthy), had this stricken and
monumental creature in its horrid clutches.
In a whisper—“Parthy!”
A groan, hollow, heartrending, mortuary.
He entered, shut the door softly, tiptoed over to the bed, laid a
comforting brown paw on the shivering shoulder. The shoulder became
convulsive, the shivers swelled to heaves. “Now, now, Parthy! What you
taking on so for? God A’mighty, person’d think she’d done something to
shame you instead of make you mighty proud. If you’d see her! Why, say,
she’s a born actress.”
The groans now became a wail. The eyes unclosed. The figure raised
itself to a sitting posture. The sopping rag rolled limply off. Parthy
rocked herself to and fro. “My own daughter! An actress! That I should
have lived to see this day! . . . Rather have . . . in her grave . . .
why I ever allowed her to set foot on this filthy scow . . .”
“Now, Parthy, you’re just working yourself up. Matter of fact, that time
Mis’ Means turned her ankle and we thought she couldn’t step on it, you
was all for going on in her part, and I bet if Sophy Means hadn’t tied
up her foot and gone on like a soldier she is, we’d of had you acting
that night. You was rarin’ to. I watched you.”
“Me! Acting on the stage! Not that I couldn’t play better than any Sophy
Means, and that’s no compliment. A poor stick if I couldn’t.” But her
defence lacked conviction. Andy had surprised a secret ambition in this
iron-armoured bosom.
“Now, come on! Cheer up! Ought to be proud your own daughter stepping in
and saving us money like this. We’d of closed. Had to. God knows when
that new baggage’ll get here, if she gets here at all. What do you think
of that Chipley! Way I’ve treated that girl, if she’d been my own
daughter—well! . . . How’d you like a nice little sip of whisky,
Parthy? Then you come on down give Nollie a hand with her costumes.
Chipley’s stuff comes up on her like ballet skirts.—Now, now, now! I
didn’t say she——Oh, my God!”
Parthy had gone off again into hysterics. “My own daughter! My little
girl!”
The time for severe measures had come. Andy had not dealt with actresses
for years without learning something of the weapons with which to fight
hysteria.
“All right. I’ll give you something to screech for. The boys paraded
this noon with a banner six feet long and red letters a foot high
announcing the Appearance Extraordinaire of Magnolia the Mysterious
Comedy Tragedienne in The Parson’s Bride. I made a special spiel on the
corner. We got the biggest advance sale we had this season. Yessir!
Doc’s downstairs raking it in with both hands and you had the least bit
of gumption in you, instead of laying here whining and carrying on,
you’d——”
“What’s the advance?” spake up Parthy, the box-office expert.
“Three hundred; and not anywheres near four o’clock.”