great drops plumped themselves down on the silk bosom of her bodice with
the open-throated neck line. It seemed to her that she heard them
splash.
“H’m!” cackled the old man.
The glittering one leaned toward her. She was enveloped in a waft of
perfume. “Now, now, Mrs. Ravenal! There’s absolutely nothing to worry
about. Your husband has been delayed. That’s all. Unavoidably delayed.”
She snatched at this. “Do you think—? Are you sure? But he always is
back by six, at the latest. Always. And we were going to dinner—and
Mc——”
“You brides!” smiled the young man. He actually patted her hand, then.
Just a touch. “Now you just have a bite of dinner, like a sensible
little woman.”
“Oh, I couldn’t eat a bite! I couldn’t!”
“A cup of tea. Let me send up a cup of tea.”
The old one made a sucking sound with tongue and teeth, rubbed his chin,
and proffered his suggestion in a voice that seemed to Magnolia to echo
and reëcho through the hotel lobby. “Why’n’t you send a messenger around
for him, madam?”
“Messenger? Around? Where?”
Sparkler made a little gesture—a tactful gesture. “Perhaps he’s having
a little game of—uh—cards; and you know how time flies. I’ve done the
same thing myself. Look up at the clock and first thing you know it’s
eight. Now if I were you, Mrs. Ravenal——”
She knew, then. There was something so sure about this young man; and so
pitying. And suddenly she, too, was sure. She recalled in a flash that
time when they were playing Paducah, and he had not come. They had held
the curtain until after eight. Ralph had searched for him. He had been
playing poker in a waterfront saloon. Send around for him! Not she. The
words of a popular sentimental song of the day went through her mind,
absurdly.
Father, dear father, come home with me now.
The clock in the steeple strikes one.
She drew herself up, now. The actress. She even managed a smile, as even
and sparkling and toothy as the sparkler’s own. “Of course. I’m very
silly. Thank you so . . . I’ll just have a bit of supper in my
room. . . .” She turned away with a little gracious bow. The eyes very
wide again.
“H’m!” The old man. Translated it meant, “Little idiot!”
She took off the dress with the two dark spots on the silk of the
basque. She put away his linen and his shiny shoes. She took up some
sewing. But the mist interfered with that. She threw herself on the bed.
An agony of tears. That was better. Ten o’clock. She fell asleep, the
gas lights burning. At a little before midnight he came in. She awoke
with a little cry. Queerly enough, the first thing she noticed was that
he had not his cane—the richly mottled malacca stick that he always
carried. She heard herself saying, ridiculously, half awake, half
asleep, “Where’s your cane?”
His surprise at this matter-of-fact reception made his expression almost
ludicrous. “Cane! Oh, that’s so. Why I left it. Must have left it.”
In the years that followed she learned what the absence of the malacca
stick meant. It had come to be a symbol in every pawnshop on Clark
Street. Its appearance was bond for a sum a hundred times its actual
value. Gaylord Ravenal always paid his debts.
She finished undressing, in silence. Her face was red and swollen. She
looked young and helpless and almost ugly. He was uncomfortable and
self-reproachful. “I’m sorry, Nola. I was detained. We’ll go to the
theatre to-morrow night.”
She almost hated him then. Being, after all, a normal woman, there
followed a normal scene—tears, reproaches, accusations, threats,
pleadings, forgiveness. Then:
“Uh—Nola, will you let me take your ring—just for a day or two?”
“Ring?” But she knew.
“You’ll have it back. This is Wednesday. You’ll have it by Saturday. I
swear it.”
The clear white diamond had begun its travels with the malacca stick.
He had spoken the truth when he said that he had been unavoidably
detained.
She had meant not to sleep. She had felt sure that she would not sleep.
But she was young and healthy and exhausted from emotion. She slept. As
she lay there by his side she thought, before she slept, that life was
very terrible—but fascinating. Even got from this a glow of discovery.
She felt old and experienced and married and tragic. She thought of her
mother. She was much, much older and more married, she decided, than her
mother ever had been.
They returned to Thebes in February. Magnolia longed to be near her
father. She even felt a pang of loneliness for her mother. The little
white cottage near the river, at Thebes, looked like a toy house. Her
bedroom was doll-size. The town was a miniature village, like a child’s
Christmas set. Her mother’s bonnet was a bit of grotesquerie. Her
father’s face was etched with lines that she did not remember having
seen there when she left. The home-cooked food, prepared by Parthy’s
expert hands, was delicious beyond belief. She was a traveller returned
from a far place.
Captain Andy had ordered a new boat. He talked of nothing else. The old
_Cotton Blossom_, bought from Pegram years before, was to be discarded.
The new boat was to be lighted by some newfangled gas arrangement
instead of the old kerosene lamps. Carbide or some such thing Andy said
it was. There were to be special footlights, new scenery, improved
dressing and sleeping rooms. She was being built at the St. Louis
shipyards.
“She’s a daisy!” squeaked Andy, capering. He had just returned from a
trip to the place of the _Cotton Blossom’s_ imminent birth. Of the two
impending accouchements—that which was to bring forth a grandchild and
that which was to produce a new show boat—it was difficult to say which
caused him keenest anticipation. Perhaps, secretly, it was the boat,
much as he loved Magnolia. He was, first, the river man; second, the
showman; third, the father.
“Like to know what you want a new boat for!” Parthy scolded. “Take all
the money you’ve earned these years past with the old tub and throw it
away on a new one.”
“Old one ain’t good enough.”
“Good enough for the riff-raff we get on it.”
“Now, Parthy, you know’s well’s I do you couldn’t be shooed off the
rivers now you’ve got used to ’em. Any other way of living’d seem stale
to you.”
“I’m a woman loves her home and asks for nothing better.”
“Bet you wouldn’t stay ashore, permanent, if you had the chance.”
He won the wager, though he had to die to do it.
The new _Cotton Blossom_ and the new grandchild had a trial by flood on
their entrance into life. The Mississippi, savage mother that she was,
gave them both a baptism that threatened for a time to make their
entrance into and their exit from the world a simultaneous act. But
both, after some perilous hours, were piloted to safety; the one by old
Windy, who swore that this was his last year on the rivers; the other by
a fat midwife and a frightened young doctor. Through storm and flood was
heard the voice of Parthenia Ann Hawks, the scold, berating Captain
Hawks her husband, and Magnolia Ravenal her daughter, as though they,
and not the elements, were responsible for the predicament in which they
now found themselves.
There followed four years of war and peace. The strife was internal. It
raged between Parthy and her son-in-law. The conflict of the two was a
chemical thing. Combustion followed inevitably upon their meeting. The
biting acid of Mrs. Hawks’ discernment cut relentlessly through the
outer layers of the young man’s charm and grace and melting manner and
revealed the alloy. Ravenal’s nature recoiled at sight of a woman who
employed none of the arts of her sex and despised and penetrated those
of the opposite sex. She had no vanity, no coquetry, no reticences, no
respect for the reticence of others; treated compliment as insult, met
flattery with contempt.
A hundred times during those four years he threatened to leave the
_Cotton Blossom_, yet he was held to his wife Magnolia and to the child
Kim by too many tender ties. His revolt usually took the form of a
gambling spree ashore during which he often lost every dollar he had
saved throughout weeks of enforced economy. There was no opportunity to
spend money legitimately in the straggling hamlets to whose landings the
_Cotton Blossom_ was so often fastened. Then, too, the easy indolence of
the life was beginning to claim him—its effortlessness, its freedom
from responsibility. Perhaps a new part to learn at the beginning of the
season—that was all. River audiences liked the old plays. Came to see
them again and again. It was Ravenal who always made the little speech
in front of the curtain. Wish to thank you one and all . . . always glad
to come back to the old . . . to-morrow night that thrilling
comedy-drama entitled . . . each and every one . . . concert after the
show . . .
Never had the _Cotton Blossom_ troupe so revelled in home-baked cakes,
pies, cookies; home-brewed wine; fruits of tree and vine. The female
population of the river towns from the Great Lakes to the Gulf beheld in
him the lover of their secret dreams and laid at his feet burnt
offerings and shewbread. Ravenal, it was said by the _Cotton Blossom_
troupe, could charm the gold out of their teeth.
Perhaps, with the passing of the years, he might have grown quite
content with this life. Sometimes the little captain, when the two men
were conversing quietly apart, dropped a word about the future.
“When I’m gone—you and Magnolia—the boat’ll be yours, of course.”
Ravenal would laugh. Little Captain Andy looked so very much alive, his
bright brown eyes glancing here and there, missing nothing on land or
shore, his brown paw scratching the whiskers that showed so little of
gray, his nimble legs scampering from texas to gangplank, never still
for more than a minute.
“No need to worry about that for another fifty years,” Ravenal assured
him.
The end had in it, perhaps, a touch of the ludicrous, as had almost
everything the little capering captain did. The _Cotton Blossom_, headed
upstream on the Mississippi, bound for St. Louis, had struck a snag in
Cahokia Bend, three miles from the city. It was barely dawn, and a dense
fog swathed the river. The old _Cotton Blossom_ probably would have sunk
midstream. The new boat stood the shock bravely. In the midst of the
pandemonium that followed the high shrill falsetto of the little
captain’s voice could be heard giving commands which he, most of all,
knew he had no right to give. The pilot only was to be obeyed under such
conditions. The crew understood this, as did the pilot. It was, in fact,
a legend that more than once in a crisis Captain Andy on the upper deck
had screamed his orders in a kind of dramatic frenzy of satisfaction,
interspersing these with picturesque and vivid oaths during which he had
capered and bounced his way right off the deck and into the river, from
which damp station he had continued to screech his orders and
profanities in cheerful unconcern until fished aboard again. Exactly
this happened. High above the clamour rose the voice of Andy. His little
figure whirled like that of a dervish. Up, down, fore, aft—suddenly he
was overboard unseen in the dimness, in the fog, in the savage swift
current of the Mississippi, wrapped in the coils of the old yellow
serpent, tighter, tighter, deeper, deeper, until his struggles ceased.
She had him at last.
“The river,” Magnolia had said, over and over, “The river. The river.”
XII
“Thebes?” echoed Parthenia Ann Hawks, widow. The stiff crêpe of her
weeds seemed to bristle. “I’ll do nothing of the kind, miss! If you and
that fine husband of yours think to rid yourself of me _that_ way——”
“But, Mama, we’re not trying to rid ourselves of you. How can you think
of such things! You’ve always said you hated the boat. Always. And now
that Papa—now that you needn’t stay with the show any longer, I thought
you’d want to go back to Thebes to live.”
“Indeed! And what’s to become of the _Cotton Blossom_, tell me that,
Maggie Hawks!”
“I don’t know,” confessed Magnolia, miserably. “I don’t—know. That’s
what I think we ought to talk about.” The _Cotton Blossom_, after her
tragic encounter with the hidden snag in the Mississippi, was in for
repairs. The damage to the show boat had been greater than they had
thought. The snag had, after all, inflicted a jagged wound. So, too, had
it torn and wounded something deep and hidden in Magnolia’s soul.
Suddenly she had a horror of the great river whose treacherous secret
fangs had struck so poisonously. The sight of the yellow turbid flood
sickened her; yet held her hypnotized. Now she thought that she must run
from it, with her husband and her child, to safety. Now she knew that
she never could be content away from it. She wanted to flee. She longed
to stay. This, if ever, was her chance. But the river had Captain Andy.
Somewhere in its secret coils he lay. She could not leave him. On the
rivers the three great mysteries—Love and Birth and Death—had been
revealed to her. All that she had known of happiness and tragedy and
tranquillity and adventure and romance and fulfilment was bound up in
the rivers. Their willow-fringed banks framed her world. The motley
figures that went up and down upon them or that dwelt on their shores
were her people. She knew them; was of them. The Mississippi had her as
surely as it had little Andy Hawks.
“Well, we’re talking about it, ain’t we?” Mrs. Hawks now demanded.
“I mean—the repairs are going to be quite expensive. She’ll be laid up
for a month or more, right in the season. Now’s the time to decide
whether we’re going to try to run her ourselves just as if Papa were
still——”
“I can see you’ve been talking things over pretty hard and fast with
Ravenal. Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, miss. We’re going
to run her ourselves—leastways, I am.”
“But, Mama!”
“Your pa left no will. Hawks all over. I’ve as much say-so as you have.
More. I’m his widow. You won’t see me willing to throw away the
good-will of a business that it’s taken years to build up. The boat’s
insurance’ll take care of the repairs. Your pa’s life insurance is paid
up, and quite a decent sum—for him. I saw to that. You’ll get your
share, I’ll get mine. The boat goes on like it always has. No Thebes for
me. You’ll go on playing ingénue leads; Ravenal juvenile. Kim——”
“No!” cried Magnolia much as Parthy had, years before. “Not Kim.”
“Why not?”
There was about the Widow Hawks a terrifying and invincible energy. Her
black habiliments of woe billowed about her like the sable wings of a
destroying angel. With Captain Andy gone, she would appoint herself
commander of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre. Magnolia knew
that. Who, knowing Parthy, could imagine it otherwise? She would appoint
herself commander of their lives. Magnolia was no weakling. She was a
woman of mettle. But no mettle could withstand the sledge-hammer blows
of Parthy Ann Hawks’ iron.
It was impossible that such an arrangement could hold. From the first
Ravenal rejected it. But Magnolia’s pleadings for at least a trial won
him over, but grudgingly.
“It won’t work, Nola, I tell you. We’ll be at each other’s throats.
She’s got all kinds of plans. I can see them whirling around in her
eye.”
“But you will try to be patient, won’t you, Gay? For my sake and Kim’s?”
But they had not been out a week before mutiny struck the _Cotton
Blossom_. The first to go was Windy. Once his great feet were set toward
the gangplank there was no stopping him. He was over seventy now, but he
looked not an hour older than when he had come aboard the _Cotton
Blossom_ almost fifteen years before. To the irate widow he spoke
briefly but with finality.
“You’re Hawks’ widow. That’s why I said I’d take her same’s if Andy was
alive. I thought Nollie’s husband would boss this boat, but seems you’re
running it. Well, ma’am, I ain’t no petticoat-pilot. I’m off the end of
this trip down. Young Tanner’ll come aboard there and pilot you.”
“Tanner! Who’s he? How d’you know I want him? I’m running this boat.”
“You better take him, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am. He’s young, and not set in his
ways, and likely won’t mind your nagging. I’m too old. Lost my taste for
the rivers, anyway, since Cap went. Lost my nerve, too, seems
like. . . . Well, ma’am, I’m going.”
And he went.
Changes came then, tripping on each other’s heels. Mis’ Means stayed,
and little weak-chested Mr. Means. Frank had gone after Magnolia’s
marriage. Ralph left.
Parthy met these difficulties and defeats with magnificent generalship.
She seemed actually to thrive on them. Do this. Do that. Ravenal’s right
eyebrow was cocked in a perpetual circumflex of disdain. One could feel
the impact of opposition whenever the two came together. Every fibre of
Ravenal’s silent secretive nature was taut in rejection of this
managerial mother-in-law. Every nerve and muscle of that energetic
female’s frame tingled with enmity toward this suave soft-spoken
contemptuous husband of her daughter.
Finally, “Choose,” said Gaylord Ravenal, “between your mother and me.”
Magnolia chose. Her decision met with such terrific opposition from
Parthy as would have shaken any woman less determined and less in love.
“Where you going with that fine husband of yours? Tell me that!”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll warrant you don’t. No more does he. Why’re you going? You’ve got a
good home on the boat.”
“Kim . . . school . . .”
“Fiddlesticks!”
Magnolia took the plunge. “We’re not—I’m not—Gay’s not happy any more
on the rivers.”
“You’ll be a sight unhappier on land before you’re through, make no
mistake about that, young lady. Where’ll you go? Chicago, h’m? What’ll
you do there? Starve, and worse. I know. Many’s the time you’ll wish
yourself back here.”
Magnolia, nervous, apprehensive, torn, now burst into sudden rebellion
against the iron hand that had gripped her all these years.
“How do you know? How can you be so sure? And even if you are right,
what of it? You’re always trying to keep people from doing the things
they want to do. You’re always wanting people to live cautiously. You
fought to keep Papa from buying the _Cotton Blossom_ in the first place,
and made his life a hell. And now you won’t leave it. You didn’t want me
to act. You didn’t want me to marry Gay. You didn’t want me to have Kim.
Maybe you were right. Maybe I shouldn’t have done any of those things.
But how do you know? You can’t twist people’s lives around like that,
even if you twist them right. Because how do you know that even when
you’re right you mayn’t be wrong? If Papa had listened to you, we’d be
living in Thebes. He’d be alive, probably. I’d be married to the
butcher, maybe. You can’t do it. Even God lets people have their own
way, though they have to fall down and break their necks to find out
they were wrong. . . . You can’t do it . . . and you’re glad when it
turns out badly . . .”
She was growing incoherent.
Back of Parthy’s opposition to their going was a deep relief of which
even she was unaware, and whose existence she would have denied had she
been informed of it. Her business talent, so long dormant, was leaping
into life. Her energy was cataclysmic. One would almost have said she
was happy. She discharged actors, crew; engaged actors, crew. Ordered
supplies. Spoke of shifting to an entirely new territory the following
year—perhaps to the rivers of North Carolina and Maryland. She actually
did this, though not until much later. Magnolia, years afterward reading
her mother’s terse and maddening letters, would be seized with a
nostalgia not for the writer but for the lovely-sounding places of which
she wrote—though they probably were as barren and unpicturesque as the
river towns of the Mississippi and Ohio and Big Sandy and Kanawha.
“We’re playing the town of Bath, on the Pamlico River,” Parthy’s letter
would say. Or, “We had a good week at Queenstown, on the Sassafras.”
Magnolia, looking out into the gray Chicago streets, slippery with black
ice, thick with the Lake Michigan fog, would repeat the names over to
herself. Bath on the Pamlico. Queenstown on the Sassafras.
Mrs. Hawks, at parting, was all for Magnolia’s retaining her financial
share in the _Cotton Blossom_, the money accruing therefrom to be paid
at regular intervals. In this she was right. She knew Ravenal. In her
hard and managing way she loved her daughter; wished to insure her best
interests. But Magnolia and Ravenal preferred to sell their share
outright if she would buy. Ravenal would probably invest it in some
business, Magnolia said.
“Yes—monkey business,” retorted Mrs. Hawks. Then added, earnestly, “Now
mind, don’t you come snivelling to me when it’s gone and you and your
child haven’t a penny to bless yourselves with. For that’s what it’ll
come to in the end. Mark my words. I don’t say I wouldn’t be happy to
see you and Kim back. But not him. When he’s run through every penny of
your money, he needn’t look to me for more. You can come back to the
boat; you and Kim. I’ll look for you. But him! Never!”
The two women faced each other, and they were no longer mother and
daughter but two forces opposing each other with all the strength that
lay in the deep and powerful nature of both.
Magnolia made one of those fine speeches. “I wouldn’t come to you for
help—not if I were starving to death, and Kim too.”
“Oh, there’s worse things than starving to death.”
“I wouldn’t come to you no matter what.”
“You will, just the same. I’d take my oath on that.”
“I never will.”
Secretly she was filled with terror at leaving the rivers; for the
rivers, and the little inaccessible river towns, and the indolent and
naïve people of those towns whose very presence in them confessed them
failures, had with the years taken on in Magnolia’s eyes the friendly
aspect of the accustomed. Here was comfort assured; here were friends;
here the ease that goes with familiarity. Even her mother’s bristling
generalship had in it a protective quality. The very show boat was a
second mother, shielding her from the problems and cares that beset the
land-dweller. The _Cotton Blossom_ had been a little world in itself on
which life was a thing detached, dream-like, narcotic.
As Magnolia Ravenal, with her husband and her child, turned from this
existence of ease to the outside world of which she already had had one
bitter taste, she was beset by hordes of fears and doubts. Yet opposing
these, and all but vanquishing them, was the strong love of
adventure—the eager curiosity about the unknown—which had always
characterized her and her dead father, the little captain, and caused
them both to triumph, thus far, over the clutching cautious admonitions
of Parthenia Ann Hawks.
Fright and anticipation; nostalgia and curiosity; a soaring sense of
freedom at leaving her mother’s too-protective wing; a pang of
compunction that she should feel this unfilial surge of relief.
They were going. You saw the three of them scrambling up the steep river
bank to the levee (perhaps for the last time, Magnolia thought with a
great pang. And within herself a voice cried no! no!) Ravenal slim,
cool, contained; Magnolia whiter than usual, and frankly tearful; the
child Kim waving an insouciant farewell with both small fists. They
carried no bundles, no parcels, no valises. Ravenal disdained to carry
parcels; he did not permit those of his party to carry them. Two Negroes
in tattered and faded blue overalls made much of the luggage, stowing it
inefficiently under the seats and over the floor of the livery rig which
had been hired to take the three to the nearest railway station, a good
twelve miles distant.