of bed revealing, rather inexplicably, a complete lower costume
including shoes.
Andy was off, down the stairs, up the aisle, into the orchestra pit just
in time to hear Magnolia say, “Schultzy, _please_! Don’t throw me the
line like that, I know it. I didn’t stop because I was stuck.”
“What’d you stop for, then, and look like you’d seen spooks!”
“I stopped a-purpose. She sees her husband that she hates and that she
thought was dead for years come sneaking in, and she wouldn’t start
right in to talk. She’d just stand there, kind of frozen and stiff,
staring at him.”
“All right, if you know so much about directing, go ahead and di——”
She ran to him, threw her arms about him, hugged him, all contrition.
“Oh, Schultzy, don’t be mad. I didn’t go to boss. I just wanted to act
it like I felt. And I’m awfully sorry about Elly and everything. I’ll do
as you say, only I just can’t help thinking, Schultzy dear, that she’d
stand there, staring kind of silly, almost.”
“You’re right. I guess my mind ain’t on my work. I ought to know how
right you are. I got that letter Elly left for me, I just stood there
gawping with my mouth open, and never said a word for I don’t know how
long——Oh, my God!”
“There, there, Schultzy.”
By a tremendous effort (the mechanics of which were not entirely
concealed) Schultzy, the man, gave way to Harold Westbrook, the artist.
“You’re right, Magnolia. That’ll get ’em. You standing there like that,
stunned and pale.”
“How’ll I get pale, Schultzy?”
“You’ll feel pale inside and the audience’ll think you are.” (The whole
art of acting unconsciously expressed by Schultzy.) “Then Frank here has
his sneery speech—_so_ and so and _so_ and so and _so_ and so—and
thought you’d marry the parson, huh? And then you open up with your big
scene—_so_ and so and _so_ and so and _so_ and so——”
Outwardly calm, Magnolia took only a cup of coffee at dinner, and
Parthy, for once, did not press her to eat. That mournful matron, though
still occasionally shaken by a convulsive shudder, managed her usual
heartening repast and actually spent the time from four to seven
lengthening Elly’s frocks for Magnolia and taking them in to fit the
girl’s slight frame.
Schultzy made her up, and rather overdid it so that, as the deserted
wife and school teacher and, later, as the Parson’s prospective bride,
she looked a pass between a healthy Camille and Cleopatra just before
she applied the asp. In fact, in their effort to bridge the gap left by
Elly’s sudden flight, the entire company overdid everything and thus
brought about the cataclysmic moment which is theatrical show-boat
history.
Magnolia, so sure of her lines during rehearsal, forgot them a score of
times during the performance and, had it not been for Schultzy, who
threw them to her unerringly and swiftly, would have made a dismal
failure of this, her first stage appearance. They were playing Vidallia,
always a good show-boat town. The house was filled from the balcony
boxes to the last row downstairs near the door, from which point very
little could be seen and practically nothing heard. Something of the
undercurrent of excitement which pervaded the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe
seemed to seep through the audience; or perhaps even an audience so
unsophisticated as this could not but sense the unusual in this
performance. Every one of the troupe—Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Mr. Means,
Frank, Ralph, the Soapers (Character Team that had succeeded Julie and
Steve)—all were trembling for Magnolia. And because they were fearful
for her they threw themselves frantically into their parts. Magnolia,
taking her cue (literally as well as figuratively) from them, did
likewise. As ingénue lead, her part was that of a young school mistress
earning her livelihood in a little town. Deserted some years before by
her worthless husband, she learns now of his death. The town parson has
long been in love with her, and she with him. Now they can marry. The
wedding gown is finished. The guests are invited.
This is her last day as school teacher. She is alone in the empty
schoolroom. Farewell, dear pupils. Farewell, dear schoolroom,
blackboard, erasers, water-bucket, desk, etc. She picks up her key. But
what is this evil face in the doorway! Who is this drunken, leering
tramp, grisly in rags, repulsive—— My God! You! My husband!
(Never was villain so black and diabolical as Frank. Never was heroine
so lovely and frail and trembling and helpless and white—as per
Schultzy’s directions. As for Schultzy himself, the heroic parson, very
heavily made up and pure yet brave withal, it was a poor stick of a
maiden who wouldn’t have contrived to get into some sort of distressing
circumstance just for the joy of being got out of it by this godly yet
godlike young cleric.)
Frank, then: “I reckon you thought I was dead. Well, I’m about the
livest corpse you ever saw.” A diabolical laugh. “Too damn bad you won’t
be able to wear that new wedding dress.”
Pleadings, agony, despair.
Now his true villainy comes out. A thousand dollars, then, and quick, or
you don’t walk down the aisle to the music of no wedding march.
“I haven’t got it.”
“No! Where’s the money you been saving all these years?”
“I haven’t a thousand dollars. I swear it.”
“So!” Seizes her. Drags her across the room. Screams. His hand stifles
them.
Unfortunately, in their very desire to help Magnolia, they all
exaggerated their villainy, their heroism, their business. Being a
trifle uncertain of her lines, Magnolia, too, sought to cover her
deficiencies by stressing her emotional scenes. When terror was required
her face was distorted with it. Her screams of fright were real screams
of mortal fear. Her writhings would have wrung pity from a fiend. Frank
bared his teeth, chortled like a maniac. He wound his fingers in her
long black hair and rather justified her outcry. In contrast, Schultzy’s
nobility and purity stood out as crudely and unmistakably as white
against black. Nuances were not for show-boat audiences.
So then, screams, protestations, snarls, ha-ha’s, pleadings, agony,
cruelty, anguish.
Something—intuition—or perhaps a sound from the left upper box made
Frank, the villain, glance up. There, leaning over the box rail, his
face a mask of hatred, his eyes glinting, sat a huge hairy backwoodsman.
And in his hand glittered the barrel of a businesslike gun. He was
taking careful aim. Drama had come late into the life of this literal
mind. He had, in the course of a quick-shooting rough-and-tumble career,
often seen the brutal male mishandling beauty in distress. His code was
simple. One second more and he would act on it.
Frank’s hand released his struggling victim. Gentleness and love
overspread his features, dispelling their villainy. To Magnolia’s
staring and open-mouthed amazement he made a gesture of abnegation.
“Well, Marge, I ain’t got nothin’ more to say if you and the parson want
to get married.” After which astounding utterance he slunk rapidly off,
leaving the field to what was perhaps the most abject huddle of heroism
that every graced a show-boat stage.
The curtain came down. The audience, intuitively glancing toward the
upper box, ducked, screamed, or swore. The band struck up. The
backwoodsman, a little bewildered but still truculent, subsided
somewhat. A trifle mystified, but labouring under the impression that
this was, perhaps, the ordinary routine of the theatre, the audience
heard Schultzy, in front of the curtain, explaining that the villain was
taken suddenly ill; that the concert would now be given free of charge;
that each and every man, woman, and child was invited to retain his
seat. The backwoodsman, rather sheepish now, took a huge bite of Honest
Scrap and looked about him belligerently. Out came Mr. Means to do his
comic Chinaman. Order reigned on one side of the footlights at least,
though behind the heaving Venetian lagoon was a company saved from
collapse only by a quite human uncertainty as to whether tears or
laughter would best express their state of mind.
The new ingénue lead, scheduled to meet the _Cotton Blossom_ at Natchez,
failed to appear. Magnolia, following her trial by firearms, had played
the absent Elly’s parts for a week. There seemed to be no good reason
why she should not continue to do so at least until Captain Andy could
engage an ingénue who would join the troupe at New Orleans.
A year passed. Magnolia was a fixture in the company. Now, as she, in
company with Parthy or Mis’ Means or Mrs. Soaper, appeared on the front
street of this or that little river town, she was stared at and
commented on. Round-eyed little girls, swinging on the front gate, gazed
at her much as she had gazed, not so many years before, at Elly and
Julie as they had sauntered down the shady path of her own street in
Thebes.
She loved the life. She worked hard. She cherished the admiration and
applause. She took her work seriously. Certainly she did not consider
herself an apostle of art. She had no illusions about herself as an
actress. But she did thrive on the warm electric current that flowed
from those river audiences made up of miners, farmers, Negroes,
housewives, harvesters, backwoodsmen, villagers, over the footlights, to
her. A naïve people, they accepted their theatre without question, like
children. That which they saw they believed. They hissed the villain,
applauded the heroine, wept over the plight of the wronged. The plays
were as naïve as the audience. In them, onrushing engines were cheated
of their victims; mill wheels were stopped in the nick of time; heroes,
bound hand and foot and left to be crushed under iron wheels, were
rescued by the switchman’s ubiquitous daughter. Sheriffs popped up
unexpectedly in hidden caves. The sound of horses’ hoofs could always be
heard when virtue was about to be ravished. They were the minstrels of
the rivers, these players, telling in terms of blood, love, and
adventure the crude saga of a new country.
Frank, the Heavy, promptly fell in love with Magnolia. Parthy, quick to
mark the sheep’s eyes he cast in the direction of the ingénue lead,
watched him with a tigress glare, and though he lived on the _Cotton
Blossom_, as did Magnolia; saw her all day, daily; probably was seldom
more than a hundred feet removed from her, he never spoke to her alone
and certainly never was able to touch her except in the very public
glare of the footlights with some hundreds of pairs of eyes turned on
the two by the _Cotton Blossom_ audiences. He lounged disconsolately
after her, a large and somewhat splay-footed fellow whose head was too
small for his shoulders, giving him the look of an inverted exclamation
point.
His unrequited and unexpressed passion for Magnolia would have bothered
that young lady and her parents very little were it not for the fact
that his emotions began to influence his art. In his scenes on the stage
with her he became more and more uncertain of his lines. Not only that,
his attitude and tone as villain of the piece took on a tender note most
mystifying to the audience, accustomed to seeing villainy black, with no
half tones. When he should have been hurling Magnolia into the mill
stream or tying her brutally to the track, or lashing her with a
horsewhip or snarling at her like a wolf, he became a cooing dove. His
blows were caresses. His baleful glare became a simper of adoration.
“Do you intend to speak to that sheep, or shall I?” demanded Parthy of
her husband.
“I’ll do it,” Andy assured her, hurriedly. “Leave him be till we get to
New Orleans. Then, if anything busts, why, I can always get some kind of
a fill-in there.”
They had been playing the Louisiana parishes—little Catholic
settlements between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, their inhabitants a
mixture of French and Creole. Frank had wandered disconsolately through
the miniature cathedral which each little parish boasted and, returning,
had spoken darkly of abandoning the stage for the Church.
New Orleans meant mail for the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe. With that mail
came trouble. Schultzy, white but determined, approached Captain Andy,
letter in hand.
“I got to go, Cap. She needs me.”
“Go!” squeaked Andy. His squeak was equivalent to a bellow in a man of
ordinary stature. “Go where? What d’you mean, she?” But he knew.
Out popped Parthy, scenting trouble.
Schultzy held out a letter written on cheap paper, lined, and smelling
faintly of antiseptic. “She’s in the hospital at Little Rock. Says she’s
had an operation. He’s left her, the skunk. She ain’t got a cent.”
“I’ll take my oath on that,” Parthy put in, pungently.
“You can’t go and leave me flat now, Schultzy.”
“I got to go, I tell you. Frank can play leads till you get somebody, or
till I get back. Old Means can play utility at a pinch, and Doc can do
general business.”
“Frank,” announced Parthy, with terrible distinctness, “will play no
leads in this company, and so I tell you, Hawks.”
“Who says he’s going to! A fine-looking lead he’d make, with that
pin-head of his, and those elephant’s hoofs. . . . Now looka here,
Schultzy. You been a trouper long enough to know you can’t leave a show
in the ditch like this. No real show-boat actor’d do it, and you know
it.”
“Sure I know it. I wouldn’t do it for myself, no matter what. But it’s
her. I wrote her a letter, time she left. I got her bookings. I said if
the time comes you need me, leave me know, and I’ll come. And she needs
me, and she left me know, and I’m coming.”
“How about us!” demanded Parthy. “Leaving us in the lurch like that,
first Elly and now you after all these years. A fine pair, the two of
you.”
“Now, Parthy!”
“Oh, I’ve no patience with you, Hawks. Always letting people get the
best of you.”
“But I told you,” Schultzy began again, almost tearfully, “it’s for her,
not me. She’s sick. You can pick up somebody here in New Orleans. I bet
there’s a dozen better actors than me laying around the docks this
minute. I got to talking to a fellow while ago, down on the wharf. The
place was all jammed up with freight, and I was waiting to get by so’s I
could come aboard. I said I was an actor on the _Cotton Blossom_, and he
said he’d acted and that was a life he’d like.”
“Yes,” snapped Parthy. “I suppose he would. What does he think this is!
A bumboat! Plenty of wharf rats in New Orleans’d like nothing
better——”
Schultzy pointed to where a slim figure leaned indolently against a huge
packing case—one of hundreds of idlers dotting the great New Orleans
plank landing.
Andy adjusted the pair of ancient binoculars through which he recently
had been scanning the wharf and the city beyond the levee. He surveyed
the graceful lounging figure.
“I’d go ashore and talk to him, I was you,” advised Schultzy.
Andy put down the glasses and stared at Schultzy in amazement. “Him!
Why, I couldn’t go up and talk to him about acting on no show boat. He’s
a gentleman.”
“Here,” said Parthy, abruptly, her curiosity piqued. She in turn trained
the glasses on the object of the discussion. Her survey was brief but
ample. “He may be a gentleman. But nobody feels a gentleman with a crack
in his shoe, and he’s got one. I can’t say I like the looks of him,
specially. But with Schultzy playing us this dirty trick—well, that’s
what it amounts to, and there’s no sense trying to prettify it—we can’t
be choosers. I’d just step down talk to him if I was you, Hawks.”
IX
This, then, turned out to be Magnolia’s first glimpse of Gaylord
Ravenal—an idle elegant figure in garments whose modish cut and fine
material served, at a distance, to conceal their shabbiness. Leaning
moodily against a tall packing case dumped on the wharf by some
freighter, he gazed about him and tapped indolently the tip of his
shining (and cracked) boot with an exquisite little ivory-topped malacca
cane. There was about him an air of distinction, an atmosphere of
richness. On closer proximity you saw that the broadcloth was shiny, the
fine linen of the shirt-front and cuffs the least bit frayed, the slim
boots undeniably split, the hat (a delicate gray and set a little on one
side) soiled as a pale gray hat must never be. From the _Cotton Blossom_
deck you saw him as the son, perhaps, of some rich Louisiana planter,
idling a moment at the water’s edge. Waiting, doubtless, for one of the
big river packets—the floating palaces of the Mississippi—to bear him
luxuriously away up the river to his plantation landing.
The truth was that Gaylord Ravenal was what the river gamblers called
broke. Stony, he would have told you. No one had a better right to use
the term than he. Of his two possessions, save the sorry clothes he had
on, one was the little malacca cane. And though he might part with cuff
links, shirt studs and, if necessary, shirt itself, he would always
cling to that little malacca cane, emblem of good fortune, his mascot.
It had turned on him temporarily. Yet his was the gambler’s
superstitious nature. To-morrow the cane would bring him luck.
Not only was Gaylord Ravenal broke; he had just politely notified the
Chief of Police of New Orleans that he was in town. The call was not
entirely one of social obligation. It had a certain statutory side as
well.
In the first place, Chief of Police Vallon, in a sudden political spasm
of virtue, endeavouring to clear New Orleans of professional gamblers,
had given them all twenty-four hours’ shrift. In the second place, this
particular visitor would have come under the head of New Orleans
undesirables on his own private account, even though his profession had
been that of philanthropist. Gaylord Ravenal had one year-old notch to
his gun.
It had not been murder in cold blood or in rage, but a shot fired in
self-defence just the fraction of a second before the other man could
turn the trick. The evidence proved this, and Ravenal’s final
vindication followed. But New Orleans gathered her civic skirts about
her and pointed a finger of dismissal toward the door. Hereafter, should
he enter, his first visit must be to the Chief of Police; and
twenty-four hours—no more—must be the limit of his stay in the city
whose pompano and crayfish and Creoles and roses and Ramos gin fizzes he
loved.
The evening before, he had stepped off the river packet _Lady Lee_, now
to be seen lying alongside the New Orleans landing together with a
hundred other craft. His twenty-four hours would expire this evening.
Certainly he had not meant to find himself in New Orleans. He had come
aboard the _Lady Lee_ at St. Louis, his finances low, his hopes high,
his erstwhile elegant garments in their present precarious state. He had
planned, following the game of stud poker in which he immediately
immersed himself, to come ashore at Memphis or, at the latest, Natchez,
with his finances raised to the high level of his hopes. Unfortunately
his was an honest and over-eager game. His sole possession, beside the
little slim malacca cane (itself of small tangible value) was a
singularly clear blue-white diamond ring which he never wore. It was a
relic of luckier days before his broadcloth had become shiny, his linen
frayed, his boots split. He had clung to it, as he had to the cane,
through almost incredible hazards. His feeling about it was neither
sentimental nor superstitious. The tenuous streak of canniness in him
told him that, possessed of a clear white diamond, one can hold up one’s
head and one’s hopes, no matter what the state of coat, linen, boots,
and hat. It had never belonged, fiction-fashion, to his sainted (if any)
mother, nor was it an old Ravenal heirloom. It was a relic of winnings
in luckier days and represented, he knew, potential hundreds. In the
trip that lasted, unexpectedly, from St. Louis to New Orleans, he had
won and lost that ring six times. When the _Lady Lee_ had nosed her way
into the Memphis landing, and again at Natchez, it had been out of his
possession. He had stayed on board, perforce. Half an hour before coming
into New Orleans he had had it again, and had kept it. The game of stud
poker had lasted days, and he rose from it the richer by exactly nothing
at all.
He had glanced out of the _Lady Lee’s_ saloon window, his eyes bloodshot
from sleeplessness, his nerves jangling, his hands twitching, his face
drawn; but that face shaven, those hands immaculate. Gaylord Ravenal, in
luck or out, had the habits and instincts of a gentleman.
“Good God!” he exclaimed now, “this looks like—it is New Orleans!” It
was N’Yawlins as he said it.
“What did you think it was?” growled one of the players, who had
temporarily owned the diamond several times during the journey down
river. “What did you think it was? Shanghai?”
“I wish it was,” said Gaylord Ravenal. Somewhat dazedly he walked down
the _Lady Lee’s_ gangplank and retorted testily to a beady-eyed
giant-footed gentleman who immediately spoke to him in a low and not
unfriendly tone, “Give me time, can’t you! I haven’t been twenty-four
hours stepping from the gangplank to this wharf, have I? Well, then!”
“No offence, Gay,” said the gentleman, his eyes still searching the
other passengers as they filed across the narrow gangplank. “Just
thought I’d remind you, case of trouble. You know how Vallon is.”
Vallon had said, briefly, later, “That’s all right, Gay. But by this
time to-morrow evening——” He had eyed Ravenal’s raiment with a
comprehending eye. “Cigar?” The weed he proffered was slim, pale, and
frayed as the man who stood before him. Gaylord Ravenal’s jangling
nerves ached for the solace of tobacco; but he viewed this palpably
second-hand gift with a glance of disdain that was a triumph of the
spirit over the flesh. Certainly no man handicapped by his present
sartorial and social deficiencies was justified in raising a quizzical
right eyebrow in the manner employed by Ravenal.
“What did you call it?” said he now.
Vallon looked at it. He was not a quick-witted gentleman. “Cigar.”
“Optimist.” And strolled out of the chiefs office, swinging the little
malacca cane.
So then, you now saw him leaning moodily against a wooden case on the
New Orleans plank wharf, distinguished, shabby, dapper, handsome, broke,
and twenty-four.
It was with some amusement that he had watched the crew of the _Mollie
Able_ bring the flat unwieldy bulk of the _Cotton Blossom_ into the
wharfside in the midst of the confusion of packets, barges, steamboats,
tugs, flats, tramp boats, shanty boats. He had spoken briefly and
casually to Schultzy while that bearer of evil tidings, letter in hand,
waited impatiently on the dock as the _Cotton Blossom_ was shifted to a
landing position farther upstream. He had seen these floating theatres
of the Mississippi and the Ohio many times, but he had never before
engaged one of their actors in conversation.
“Juvenile lead!” he had exclaimed, unable to hide something of
incredulity in his voice. Schultzy, an anxious eye on the _Mollie
Able’s_ tedious manœuvres, had just made clear to Ravenal his own
position in the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe. Ravenal, surveying the furrowed
brow, the unshaven cheeks, the careless dress, the lack-lustre eye, had
involuntarily allowed to creep into his tone something of the
astonishment he felt.
Schultzy made a little deprecating gesture with his hands, his
shoulders. “I guess I don’t look like no juvenile lead, and that’s a
fact. But I’m all shot to pieces. Took a drink the size of
this”—indicating perhaps five fingers—“up yonder on Canal Street;
straight whisky. No drinking allowed on the show boat. Well, sir, never
felt it no more’n it had been water. I just got news my wife’s sick in
the hospital.”
Ravenal made a little perfunctory sound of sympathy. “In New Orleans?”
“Little Rock, Arkansas. I’m going. It’s a dirty trick, but I’m going.”
“How do you mean, dirty trick?” Ravenal was mildly interested in this
confiding stranger.
“Leave the show flat like that. I don’t know what they’ll do. I——” He
saw that the _Cotton Blossom_ was now snugly at ease in her new
position, and that her gangplank had again been lowered. He turned away
abruptly, without a good-bye, went perhaps ten paces, came back five and
called to Ravenal. “You ever acted?”
“Acted!”
“On the stage. Acted. Been an actor.”