SHOW BOAT

BY

EDNA FERBER

AUTHOR OF

“SO BIG,” Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY EDNA FERBER.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN

THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY

LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

To

Winthrop Ames

Who First Said Show Boat

to Me

INTRODUCTION

“Show Boat” is neither history nor biography, but fiction. This statement is made in the hope that it will forestall such protest as may be registered by demon statisticians against certain liberties taken with characters, places, and events. In the Chicago portion of the book, for example, a character occasionally appears some three or four years after the actual date of his death. Now and then a restaurant or gambling resort is described as running full blast at a time when it had vanished at the frown of civic virtue. This, then, was done, not through negligence in research, but because, in the attempt to give a picture of the time, it was necessary slightly to condense a period of fifteen or twenty years.

E. F.

SHOW BOAT

I

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse. She knew whereof she spoke, for it was literally by a breath that she had escaped being called Mississippi.

“Imagine Mississippi Ravenal!” she often said, in later years. “They’d have cut it to Missy, I suppose, or even Sippy, if you can bear to think of anything so horrible. And then I’d have had to change my name or give up the stage altogether. Because who’d go to see—seriously, I mean—an actress named Sippy? It sounds half-witted, for some reason. Kim’s bad enough, God knows.”

And as Kim Ravenal you doubtless are familiar with her. It is no secret that the absurd monosyllable which comprises her given name is made up of the first letters of three states—Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri—in all of which she was, incredibly enough, born—if she can be said to have been born in any state at all. Her mother insists that she wasn’t. If you were an habitué of old South Clark Street in Chicago’s naughty ’90s you may even remember her mother, Magnolia Ravenal, as Nola Ravenal, soubrette—though Nola Ravenal never achieved the doubtful distinction of cigarette pictures. In a day when the stage measured feminine pulchritude in terms of hips, thighs, and calves, she was considered much too thin for beauty, let alone for tights.

It had been this Magnolia Ravenal’s respiratory lack that had saved the new-born girl from being cursed through life with a name boasting more quadruple vowels and consonants than any other in the language. She had meant to call the child Mississippi after the tawny untamed river on which she had spent so much of her girlhood, and which had stirred and fascinated her always. Her accouchement had been an ordeal even more terrifying than is ordinarily the case, for Kim Ravenal had actually been born on the raging turgid bosom of the Mississippi River itself, when that rampageous stream was flooding its banks and inundating towns for miles around, at five o’clock of a storm-racked April morning in 1889. It was at a point just below Cairo, Illinois; that region known as Little Egypt, where the yellow waters of the Mississippi and the olive-green waters of the Ohio so disdainfully meet and refuse, with bull-necked pride, to mingle.

From her cabin window on the second deck of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, Magnolia Ravenal could have seen the misty shores of three states—if any earthly shores had interested her at the moment. Just here was Illinois, to whose crumbling clay banks the show boat was so perilously pinioned. Beyond, almost hidden by the rain veil, was Missouri; and there, Kentucky. But Magnolia Ravenal lay with her eyes shut because the effort of lifting her lids was beyond her. Seeing her, you would have said that if any shores filled her vision at the moment they were heavenly ones, and those dangerously near. So white, so limp, so spent was she that her face on the pillow was startlingly like one of the waxen blossoms whose name she bore. Her slimness made almost no outline beneath the bedclothes. The coverlet was drawn up to her chin. There was only the white flower on the pillow, its petals closed.

Outside, the redundant rain added its unwelcome measure to the swollen and angry stream. In the ghostly gray dawn the grotesque wreckage of flood-time floated and whirled and jiggled by, seeming to bob a mad obeisance as it passed the show boat which, in its turn, made stately bows from its moorings. There drifted past, in fantastic parade, great trees, uprooted and clutching at the water with stiff dead arms; logs, catapulted with terrific force; animal carcasses dreadful in their passivity; chicken coops; rafts; a piano, its ivory mouth fixed in a death grin; a two-room cabin, upright, and moving in a minuet of stately and ponderous swoops and advances and chassés; fence rails; an armchair whose white crocheted antimacassar stared in prim disapproval at the wild antics of its fellow voyagers; a live sheep, bleating as it came, but soon still; a bed with its covers, by some freak of suction, still snugly tucked in as when its erstwhile occupant had fled from it in fright—all these, and more, contributed to the weird terror of the morning. The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious, bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp land, houses, trees, cattle—humans, even; and roaring, snarling, howling hideously as it did so.

Inside Magnolia Ravenal’s cabin all was snug and warm and bright. A wood fire snapped and crackled cosily in the little pot-bellied iron stove. Over it bent a veritable Sairey Gamp stirring something hot and savoury in a saucepan. She stirred noisily, and talked as she stirred, and glanced from time to time at the mute white figure in the bed. Her own bulky figure was made more ponderous by layer on layer of ill-assorted garments of the kind donned from time to time as night wears on by one who, having been aroused hastily and in emergency, has arrived scantily clad. A gray flannel nightgown probably formed the basis of this costume, for its grizzled cuffs could just be seen emerging from the man’s coat whose sleeves she wore turned back from the wrists for comfort and convenience. This coat was of box-cut, double-breasted, blue with brass buttons and gold braid, of the sort that river captains wear. It gave her a racy and nautical look absurdly at variance with her bulk and occupation. Peeping beneath and above and around this, the baffled eye could just glimpse oddments and elegancies such as a red flannel dressing gown; a flower-besprigged challis sacque whose frill of doubtful lace made the captain’s coat even more incongruous; a brown cashmere skirt, very bustled and bunchy; a pair of scuffed tan kid bedroom slippers (men’s) of the sort known as romeos. This lady’s back hair was twisted into a knob strictly utilitarian; her front hair bristled with the wired ends of kid curlers assumed, doubtless, the evening before the hasty summons. Her face and head were long and horse-like, at variance with her bulk. This, you sensed immediately, was a person possessed of enormous energy, determination, and the gift of making exquisitely uncomfortable any one who happened to be within hearing radius. She was the sort who rattles anything that can be rattled; slams anything that can be slammed; bumps anything that can be bumped. Her name, by some miracle of fitness, was Parthenia Ann Hawks; wife of Andy Hawks, captain and owner of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre; and mother of this Magnolia Ravenal who, having just been delivered of a daughter, lay supine in her bed.

Now, as Mrs. Hawks stirred the mess over which she was bending, her spoon regularly scraped the bottom of the pan with a rasping sound that would have tortured any nerves but her own iron-encased set. She removed the spoon, freeing it of clinging drops by rapping it smartly and metallically against the rim of the basin. Magnolia Ravenal’s eyelids fluttered ever so slightly.

“Now then!” spake Parthy Ann Hawks, briskly, in that commanding tone against which even the most spiritless instinctively rebelled, “Now then, young lady, want it or not, you’ll eat some of this broth, good and hot and stren’th’ning, and maybe you won’t look so much like a wet dish rag.” Pan in one hand, spoon in the other, she advanced toward the bed with a tread that jarred the furniture and set the dainty dimity window curtains to fluttering. She brought up against the side of the bed with a bump. A shadow of pain flitted across the white face on the pillow. The eyes still were closed. As the smell of the hot liquid reached her nostrils, the lips of the girl on the bed curled in distaste. “Here, I’ll just spoon it right up to you out of the pan, so’s it’ll be good and hot. Open your mouth! Open your eyes! I say open—— Well, for land’s sakes, how do you expect a body to do anything for you if you——”

With a motion shocking in its swift unexpectedness Magnolia Ravenal’s hand emerged from beneath the coverlet, dashed aside the spoon with its steaming contents, and sent it clattering to the floor. Then her hand stole beneath the coverlet again and with a little relaxed sigh of satisfaction she lay passive as before. She had not opened her eyes. She was smiling ever so slightly.

“That’s right! Act like a wildcat just because I try to get you to sup up a little soup that Jo’s been hours cooking, and two pounds of good mutton in it if there’s an ounce, besides vegetables and barley, and your pa practically risked his life getting the meat down at Cairo and the water going up by the foot every hour. No, you’re not satisfied to get us caught here in the flood, and how we’ll ever get out alive or dead, God knows, and me and everybody on the boat up all night long with your goings on so you’d think nobody’d ever had a baby before. Time I had you there wasn’t a whimper out of me. Not a whimper. I’d have died, first. I never saw anything as indelicate as the way you carried on, and your own husband in the room.” Here Magnolia conveyed with a flutter of the lids that this had not been an immaculate conception. “Well, if you could see yourself now. A drowned rat isn’t the word. Now you take this broth, my fine lady, or we’ll see who’s——” She paused in this dramatic threat to blow a cooling breath on a generous spoonful of the steaming liquid, to sup it up with audible appreciation, and to take another. She smacked her lips. “Now then, no more of your monkey-shines, Maggie Hawks!”

No one but her mother had ever called Magnolia Ravenal Maggie Hawks. It was unthinkable that a name so harsh and unlovely could be applied to this fragile person. Having picked up the rejected spoon and wiped it on the lace ruffle of the challis sacque, that terrible termagant grasped it firmly against surprise in her right hand and, saucepan in left, now advanced a second time toward the bed. You saw the flower on the pillow frosted by an icy mask of utter unyieldingness; you caught a word that sounded like shenanigans from the woman bending over the bed, when the cabin door opened and two twittering females entered attired in garments strangely akin to the haphazard costume worn by Mrs. Hawks. The foremost of these moved in a manner so bustling as to be unmistakably official. She was at once ponderous, playful, and menacing—this last attribute due, perhaps, to the rather splendid dark moustache which stamped her upper lip. In her arms she carried a swaddled bundle under one flannel flap of which the second female kept peering and uttering strange clucking sounds and words that resembled izzer and yesseris.

“Fine a gal’s I ever see!” exclaimed the bustling one. She approached the bed with the bundle. “Mis’ Means says the same and so”—she glanced contemptuously over her shoulder at a pale and haggard young man, bearded but boyish, who followed close behind them—“does the doctor.”

She paused before the word doctor so that the title, when finally it was uttered, carried with it a poisonous derision. This mysterious sally earned a little snigger from Mis’ Means and a baleful snort from Mrs. Hawks. Flushed with success, the lady with the swaddled bundle (unmistakably a midwife and, like all her craft, royally accustomed to homage and applause) waxed more malicious. “Fact is, he says only a minute ago, he never brought a finer baby that he can remember.”

At this the sniggers and snorts became unmistakable guffaws. The wan young man became a flushed young man. He fumbled awkwardly with the professionally massive watch chain that so unnecessarily guarded his cheap nickel blob of a watch. He glanced at the flower-like face on the pillow. Its aloofness, its remoteness from the three frowzy females that hovered about it, seemed to lend him a momentary dignity and courage. He thrust his hands behind the tails of his Prince Albert coat and strode toward the bed. A wave of the hand, a slight shove with the shoulder, dismissed the three as nuisances. “One moment, my good woman. . . . If you please, Mrs. Hawks. . . . Kindly don’t jiggle . . .”

The midwife stepped aside with the bundle. Mrs. Hawks fell back a step, the ineffectual spoon and saucepan in her hands. Mis’ Means ceased to cluck and to lean on the bed’s footboard. From a capacious inner coat pocket he produced a stethoscope, applied it, listened, straightened. From the waistcoat pocket came the timepiece, telltale of his youth and impecuniosity. He extracted his patient’s limp wrist from beneath the coverlet and held it in his own strong spatulate fingers—the fingers of the son of a farmer.

“H’m! Fine!” he exclaimed. “Splendid!”

An unmistakable sniff from the midwife. The boy’s florid manner dropped from him. He cringed a little. The sensitive hand he still held in his great grasp seemed to feel this change in him, though Magnolia Ravenal had not opened her eyes even at the entrance of the three. Her wrist slid itself out of his hold and down until her fingers met his and pressed them lightly, reassuringly. The youth looked down, startled. Magnolia Ravenal, white-lipped, was smiling her wide gay gorgeous smile that melted the very vitals of you. It was a smile at once poignant and brilliant. It showed her gums a little, and softened the planes of her high cheek-bones, and subdued the angles of the too-prominent jaw. A comradely smile, an understanding and warming one. Strange that this woman on the bed, so lately torn and racked with the agonies of childbirth, should be the one to encourage the man whose clumsy ministrations had so nearly cost her her life. That she could smile at all was sheer triumph of the spirit over the flesh. And that she could smile in sympathy for and encouragement of this bungling inexpert young medico was incredible. But that was Magnolia Ravenal. Properly directed and managed, her smile, in later years, could have won her a fortune. But direction and management were as futile when applied to her as to the great untamed Mississippi that even now was flouting man-built barriers; laughing at levees that said so far and no farther; jeering at jetties that said do thus-and-so; for that matter, roaring this very moment in derision of Magnolia Ravenal herself, and her puny pangs and her mortal plans; and her father Captain Andy Hawks, and her mother Parthenia Ann Hawks, and her husband Gaylord Ravenal, and the whole troupe of the show boat, and the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre itself, now bobbing about like a cork on the yellow flood that tugged and sucked and tore at its moorings.

Two tantrums of nature had been responsible for the present precarious position of the show boat and its occupants. The Mississippi had furnished one; Magnolia Ravenal the other. Or perhaps it might be fairer to fix the blame, not on nature, but on human stupidity that had failed to take into account its vagaries.

Certainly Captain Andy Hawks should have known better, after thirty-five years of experience on keelboats, steamboats, packets, and show boats up and down the great Mississippi and her tributaries (the Indians might call this stream the Father of Waters but your riverman respectfully used the feminine pronoun). The brand-new show boat had done it. Built in the St. Louis shipyards, the new Cotton Blossom was to have been ready for him by February. But February had come and gone, and March as well. He had meant to be in New Orleans by this time, with his fine new show boat and his troupe and his band of musicians in their fresh glittering red-and-gold uniforms, and the marvellous steam calliope that could be heard for miles up and down the bayous and plantations. Starting at St. Louis, he had planned a swift trip downstream, playing just enough towns on the way to make expenses. Then, beginning with Bayou Teche and pushed by the sturdy steamer Mollie Able, they would proceed grandly upstream, calliope screaming, flags flying, band tooting, to play every little town and landing and plantation from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg; to Memphis, to Cairo, to St. Louis, up and up to Minnesota itself; then over to the coal towns on the Monongahela River and the Kanawha, and down again to New Orleans, following the crops as they ripened—the corn belt, the cotton belt, the sugar cane; north when the wheat yellowed, following with the sun the ripening of the peas, the tomatoes, the crabs, the peaches, the apples; and as the farmer garnered his golden crops so would shrewd Captain Andy Hawks gather his harvest of gold.

It was April before the new Cotton Blossom was finished and ready to take to the rivers. Late though it was, when Captain Andy Hawks beheld her, glittering from texas to keel in white paint with green trimmings, and with Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre done in letters two feet high on her upper deck, he was vain enough, or foolhardy enough, or both, to resolve to stand by his original plan. A little nervous fussy man, Andy Hawks, with a horrible habit of clawing and scratching from side to side, when aroused or when deep in thought, at the little mutton-chop whiskers that sprang out like twin brushes just below his leather-visored white canvas cap, always a trifle too large for his head, so that it settled down over his ears. A capering figure, in light linen pants very wrinkled and baggy, and a blue coat, double-breasted; with a darting manner, bright brown eyes, and a trick of talking very fast as he clawed the mutton-chop whiskers first this side, then that, with one brown hairy little hand. There was about him something grotesque, something simian. He beheld the new Cotton Blossom as a bridegroom gazes upon a bride, and frenziedly clawing his whiskers he made his unwise decision.

“She won’t high-water this year till June.” He was speaking of that tawny tigress, the Mississippi; and certainly no one knew her moods better than he. “Not much snow last winter, north; and no rain to speak of, yet. Yessir, we’ll just blow down to New Orleans ahead of French’s Sensation”—his bitterest rival in the show-boat business—“and start to work the bayous. Show him a clean pair of heels up and down the river.”

So they had started. And because the tigress lay smooth and unruffled now, with only the currents playing gently below the surface like muscles beneath the golden yellow skin, they fancied she would remain complaisant until they had had their way. That was the first mistake.

The second was as unreasoning. Magnolia Ravenal’s child was going to be a boy. Ma Hawks and the wise married women of the troupe knew the signs. She felt thus-and-so. She had such-and-such sensations. She was carrying the child high. Boys always were slower in being born than girls. Besides, this was a first child, and the first child always is late. They got together, in mysterious female conclave, and counted on the fingers of their two hands—August, September, October, November, December—why, the end of April, the soonest. They’d be safe in New Orleans by then, with the best of doctors for Magnolia, and she on land while one of the other women in the company played her parts until she was strong again—a matter of two or three weeks at most.

No sooner had they started than the rains began. No early April showers, these, but torrents that blotted out the river banks on either side and sent the clay tumbling in great cave-ins, down to the water, jaundicing it afresh where already it seethed an ochreous mass. Day after day, night after night, the rains came down, melting the Northern ice and snow, filtering through the land of the Mississippi basin and finding its way, whether trickle, rivulet, creek, stream, or river, to the great hungry mother, Mississippi. And she grew swollen, and tossed and flung her huge limbs about and shrieked in labour even as Magnolia Ravenal was so soon to do.

Eager for entertainment as the dwellers were along the little Illinois and Missouri towns, after a long winter of dull routine on farm and in store and schoolhouse, they came sparsely to the show boat. Posters had told them of her coming, and the news filtered to the back-country. Town and village thrilled to the sound of the steam calliope as the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, propelled by the square-cut clucking old steamer, Mollie Able, swept grandly down the river to the landing. But the back-country roads were impassable bogs by now, and growing worse with every hour of rain. Wagon wheels sank to the hubs in mud. There were crude signs, stuck on poles, reading, “No bottom here.” The dodgers posted on walls and fences in the towns were rain-soaked and bleary. And as for the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre Ten Piece Band (which numbered six)—how could it risk ruin of its smart new red coats, gold-braided and gold-buttoned, by marching up the water-logged streets of these little towns whose occupants only stared wistfully out through storm-blurred windows? It was dreary even at night, when the show boat glowed invitingly with the blaze of a hundred oil lamps that lighted the auditorium seating six hundred (One Thousand Seats! A Luxurious Floating Theatre within an Unrivalled Floating Palace!). Usually the flaming oil-flares on their tall poles stuck in the steep clay banks that led down to the show boat at the water’s edge made a path of fiery splendour. Now they hissed and spluttered dismally, almost extinguished by the deluge. Even when the bill was St. Elmo or East Lynne, those tried and trusty winners, the announcement of which always packed the show boat’s auditorium to the very last seat in the balcony reserved for Negroes, there was now only a damp handful of shuffle-footed men and giggling girls and a few children in the cheaper rear seats. The Mississippi Valley dwellers, wise with the terrible wisdom born of much suffering under the dominance of this voracious and untamed monster, so ruthless when roused, were preparing against catastrophe should these days of rain continue.

Captain Andy Hawks clawed his mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that, and scanned the skies, and searched the yellowing swollen stream with his bright brown eyes. “We’ll make for Cairo,” he said. “Full steam ahead. I don’t like the looks of her—the big yella snake.”

But full steam ahead was impossible for long in a snag-infested river, as Andy Hawks well knew; and in a river whose treacherous channel shifted almost daily in normal times, and hourly in flood-time. Cautiously they made for Cairo. Cape Girardeau, Gray’s Point, Commerce—then, suddenly, near evening, the false sun shone for a brief hour. At once everyone took heart. The rains, they assured each other, were over. The spring freshet would subside twice as quickly as it had risen. Fittingly enough, the play billed for that evening was Tempest and Sunshine, always a favourite. Magnolia Ravenal cheerfully laced herself into the cruel steel-stiffened high-busted corset of the period, and donned the golden curls and the prim ruffles of the part. A goodish crowd scrambled and slipped and slid down the rain-soaked clay bank, torch-illumined, to the show boat, their boots leaving a trail of mud and water up and down the aisles of the theatre and between the seats. It was a restless audience, and hard to hold. There had been an angry sunset, and threatening clouds to the northwest. The crowd shuffled its feet, coughed, stirred constantly. There was in the air something electric, menacing, heavy. Suddenly, during the last act, the north wind sprang up with a whistling sound, and the little choppy hard waves could be heard slapping against the boat’s flat sides. She began to rock, too, and pitch, flat though she was and securely moored to the river bank. Lightning, a fusillade of thunder, and then the rain again, heavy, like drops of molten lead, and driven by the north wind. The crowd scrambled up the perilous clay banks, slipping, falling, cursing, laughing, frightened. To this day it is told that the river rose seven feet in twenty-four hours. Captain Andy Hawks, still clawing his whiskers, still bent on making for Cairo, cast off and ordered the gangplank in as the last scurrying villager clawed his way up the slimy incline whose heights the river was scaling inch by inch.

“The Ohio’s the place,” he insisted, his voice high and squeaky with excitement. “High water at Cincinnati, St. Louis, Evansville, or even Paducah don’t have to mean high-water on the Ohio. It’s the old yella serpent making all this kick-up. But the Ohio’s the river gives Cairo the real trouble. Yessir! And she don’t flood till June. We’ll make for the Ohio and stay on her till this comes to a stand, anyway.”

Then followed the bedlam of putting off. Yells, hoarse shouts, bells ringing, wheels churning the water to foam. Lively now! Cramp her down! Snatch her! Snatch her!

Faintly, above the storm, you heard the cracked falsetto of little Captain Andy Hawks, a pilot for years, squeaking to himself in his nervousness the orders that river etiquette forbade his actually giving that ruler, that ultimate sovereign, the pilot, old Mark Hooper, whose real name was no more Mark than Twain’s had been: relic of his leadsmen days, with the cry of, “Mark three! Mark three! Half twain! Quarter twain! M-A-R-K twain!” gruffly shouted along the hurricane deck.

It was told, on the rivers, that little Andy Hawks had been known, under excitement, to walk off the deck into the river and to bob afloat there until rescued, still spluttering and shrieking orders in a profane falsetto.

Down the river they went, floating easily over bars that in normal times stood six feet out of the water; clattering through chutes; shaving the shores. Thunder, lightning, rain, chaos outside. Within, the orderly routine of bedtime on the show boat. Mis’ Means, the female half of the character team, heating over a tiny spirit flame a spoonful of goose grease which she would later rub on her husband’s meagre cough-racked chest; Maudie Rainger, of the general business team, sipping her bedtime cup of coffee; Bert Forbush, utility man, in shirt sleeves, check pants, and carpet slippers, playing a sleep-inducing game of canfield—all this on the stage, bare now of scenery and turned into a haphazard and impromptu lounging room for the members of this floating theatrical company. Mrs. Hawks, in her fine new cabin on the second deck, off the gallery, was putting her sparse hair in crimpers as she would do if this were the night before Judgment Day. Flood, storm, danger—all part of river show-boat life. Ordinarily, it is true, they did not proceed down river until daybreak. After the performance, the show boat and its steamer would stay snug and still alongside the wharf of this little town or that. By midnight, company and crew would have fallen asleep to the sound of the water slap-slapping gently against the boat’s sides.

To-night there probably would be little sleep for some of the company, what with the storm, the motion, the unwonted stir, and the noise that came from the sturdy Mollie Able, bracing her cautious bulk against the flood’s swift urging; and certainly none for Captain Andy Hawks, for pilot Mark Hooper and the crew of the Mollie Able. But that, too, was all part of the life.

Midnight had found Gaylord Ravenal, in nightshirt and dressing gown, a handsome and distraught figure, pounding on the door of his mother-in-law’s cabin. From the cabin he had just left came harrowing sounds—whimpers, and little groans, and great moans, like an animal in agony. Magnolia Ravenal was not one of your silent sufferers. She was too dramatic for that. Manœuvred magically by the expert Hooper, they managed to make a perilous landing just above Cairo. The region was scoured for a doctor, without success, for accident had followed on flood. Captain Andy had tracked down a stout and reluctant midwife who consented only after an enormous bribe to make the perilous trip to the levee, clambering ponderously down the slippery bank with many groanings and forebodings, and being sustained, both in bulk and spirit, by the agile and vivacious little captain much as a tiny fussy river tug guides a gigantic and unwieldy ocean liner. He was almost frantically distraught, for between Andy Hawks and his daughter Magnolia Ravenal was that strong bond of affection and mutual understanding that always exists between the henpecked husband and the harassed offspring of a shrew such as Parthy Ann Hawks.

When, an hour later, Gaylord Ravenal, rain-soaked and mud-spattered, arrived with a white-faced young doctor’s assistant whose first obstetrical call this was, he found the fat midwife already in charge and inclined to elbow about any young medical upstart who might presume to dictate to a female of her experience.

It was a sordid and ravaging confinement which, at its climax, teetered for one dreadful moment between tragedy and broad comedy. For at the crisis, just before dawn, the fat midwife, busy with ministrations, had said to the perspiring young doctor, “D’you think it’s time to snuff her?”

Bewildered, and not daring to show his ignorance, he had replied, judicially, “Uh—not just yet. No, not just yet.”

Again the woman had said, ten minutes later, “Time to snuff her, I’d say.”

“Well, perhaps it is.” He watched her, fearfully, wondering what she might mean; cursing his own lack of knowledge. To his horror and amazement, before he could stop her, she had stuffed a great pinch of strong snuff up either nostril of Magnolia Ravenal’s delicate nose. And thus Kim Ravenal was born into the world on the gust of a series of convulsive a-CHOOs!

“God almighty, woman!” cried the young medico, in a frenzy. “You’ve killed her.”

“Run along, do!” retorted the fat midwife, testily, for she was tired by now, and hungry, and wanted her coffee badly. “H’m! It’s a gal. And they had their minds all made up to a boy. Never knew it to fail.” She turned to Magnolia’s mother, a ponderous and unwieldy figure at the foot of the bed. “Well, now, Mis’—Hawks, ain’t it?—that’s right—Hawks. Well, now, Mis’ Hawks, we’ll get this young lady washed up and then I’d thank you for a pot of coffee and some breakfast. I’m partial to a meat breakfast.”

All this had been a full hour ago. Magnolia Ravenal still lay inert, unheeding. She had not even looked at her child. Her mother now uttered bitter complaint to the others in the room.

“Won’t touch a drop of this good nourishing broth. Knocked the spoon right out of my hand, would you believe it! for all she lays there looking so gone. Well! I’m going to open her mouth and pour it down.”

The young doctor raised a protesting palm. “No, no, I wouldn’t do that.” He bent over the white face on the pillow. “Just a spoonful,” he coaxed, softly. “Just a swallow?”

She did not vouchsafe him another smile. He glanced at the irate woman with the saucepan; at the two attendant vestals. “Isn’t there somebody——?”

The men of the company and the crew were out, he well knew, with pike poles in hand, working to keep the drifting objects clear of the boats. Gaylord Ravenal would be with them. He had been in and out a score of times through the night, his handsome young face (too handsome, the awkward young doctor had privately decided) twisted with horror and pity and self-reproach. He had noticed, too, that the girl’s cries had abated not a whit when the husband was there. But when he took her writhing fingers, and put one hand on her wet forehead, and said, in a voice that broke with agony, “Oh, Nola! Nola! Don’t. I didn’t know it was like . . . Not like this. . . . Magnolia . . .”—she had said, through clenched teeth and white lips, surprisingly enough, with a knowledge handed down to her through centuries of women writhing in childbirth, “It’s all right, Gay. . . . Always . . . like this . . . damn it. . . . Don’t you worry. . . . It’s . . . all . . .” And the harassed young doctor had then seen for the first time the wonder of Magnolia Ravenal’s poignant smile.

So now when he said, shyly, “Isn’t there somebody else——” he was thinking that if the young and handsome husband could be spared for but a moment from his pike pole it would be better to chance a drifting log sent crashing against the side of the boat by the flood than that this white still figure on the bed should be allowed to grow one whit whiter or more still.

“Somebody else’s fiddlesticks!” exploded Mrs. Hawks, inelegantly. They were all terribly rude to him, poor lad, except the one who might have felt justified in being so. “If her own mother can’t——” She had reheated the broth on the little iron stove, and now made a third advance, armed with spoon and saucepan. The midwife had put the swaddled bundle on the pillow so that it lay just beside Magnolia Ravenal’s arm. It was she who now interrupted Mrs. Hawks, and abetted her.

“How in time d’you expect to nurse,” she demanded, “if you don’t eat!”

Magnolia Ravenal didn’t know and, seemingly, didn’t care.

A crisis was imminent. It was the moment for drama. And it was furnished, obligingly enough, by the opening of the door to admit the two whom Magnolia Ravenal loved in all the world. There came first the handsome, haggard Gaylord Ravenal, actually managing, in some incredible way, to appear elegant, well-dressed, dapper, at a time, under circumstances, and in a costume which would have rendered most men unsightly, if not repulsive. But his gifts were many, and not the least of them was the trick of appearing sartorially and tonsorially flawless when dishevelment and a stubble were inevitable in any other male. Close behind him trotted Andy Hawks, just as he had been twenty-four hours before—wrinkled linen pants, double-breasted blue coat, oversize visored cap, mutton-chop whiskers and all. Together he and Ma Hawks, in her blue brass-buttoned coat that was a twin of his, managed to give the gathering quite a military aspect. Certainly Mrs. Hawks’ manner was martial enough at the moment. She raised her voice now in complaint.

“Won’t touch her broth. Ain’t half as sick as she lets on or she wouldn’t be so stubborn. Wouldn’t have the strength to be, ’s what I say.”

Gaylord Ravenal took from her the saucepan and the spoon. The saucepan he returned to the stove. He espied a cup on the washstand; with a glance at Captain Andy he pointed silently to this. Andy Hawks emptied its contents into the slop jar, rinsed it carefully, and half filled it with the steaming hot broth. The two men approached the bedside. There was about both a clumsy and touching but magically effective tenderness. Gay Ravenal slipped his left arm under the girl’s head with its hair all spread so dank and wild on the pillow. Captain Andy Hawks leaned forward, cup in hand, holding it close to her mouth. With his right hand, delicately, Gay Ravenal brought the first hot revivifying spoonful to her mouth and let it trickle slowly, drop by drop, through her lips. He spoke to her as he did this, but softly, softly, so that the others could not hear the words. Only the cadence of his voice, and that was a caress. Another spoonful, and another, and another. He lowered her again to the pillow, his arm still under her head. A faint tinge of palest pink showed under the waxen skin. She opened her eyes; looked up at him. She adored him. Her pain-dulled eyes even then said so. Her lips moved. He bent closer. She was smiling almost mischievously.

“Fooled them.”

“What’s she say?” rasped Mrs. Hawks, fearfully, for she loved the girl.

Over his shoulder he repeated the two words she had whispered.

“Oh,” said Parthy Ann Hawks, and laughed. “She means fooled ’em because it’s a girl instead of a boy.”

But at that Magnolia Ravenal shook her head ever so slightly, and looked up at him again and held up one slim forefinger and turned her eyes toward the corners with a listening look. And in obedience he held up his hand then, a warning for silence, though he was as mystified as they. And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and crash of the great river whose flood had caught them and shaken them and brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time. And now he knew what she meant. She wasn’t thinking of the child that lay against her arms. Her lips moved again. He bent closer. And what she said was:

“The River.”

II

Surely no little girl had ever had a more fantastic little girlhood than this Magnolia Ravenal who had been Magnolia Hawks. By the time she was eight she had fallen into and been fished out of practically every river in the Mississippi Basin from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota. The ordinary routine of her life, in childhood, had been made up of doing those things that usually are strictly forbidden the average child. She swam muddy streams; stayed up until midnight; read the lurid yellow-backed novels found in the cabins of the women of the company; went to school but rarely; caught catfish; drank river water out of the river itself; roamed the streets of strange towns alone; learned to strut and shuffle and buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces dotted the boards of the Southern wharves as thickly as grace notes sprinkle a bar of lively music. And all this despite constant watchfulness, nagging, and admonition from her spinster-like mother; for Parthy Ann Hawks, matron though she was, still was one of those women who, confined as favourite wife in the harem of a lascivious Turk, would have remained a spinster at heart and in manner. And though she lived on her husband’s show boat season after season, and tried to rule it from pilot house to cook’s galley, she was always an incongruous figure in the gay, careless vagabond life of this band of floating players. The very fact of her presence on the boat was a paradox. Life, for Parthy Ann Hawks, was meant to be made up of crisp white dimity curtains at kitchen windows; of bi-weekly bread bakings; of Sunday morning service and Wednesday night prayer meeting; of small gossip rolled evilly under the tongue. The male biped, to her, was a two-footed animal who tracked up a clean kitchen floor just after it was scoured and smoked a pipe in defiance of decency. Yet here she was—and had been for ten years—leading an existence which would have made that of the Stratford strollers seem orderly and prim by comparison.

She had been a Massachusetts school teacher, living with a henpecked fisherman father, and keeping house expertly for him with one hand while she taught school with the other. The villagers held her up as an example of all the feminine virtues, but the young males of the village were to be seen walking home from church with this or that plump twitterer who might be a notoriously bad cook but who had an undeniable way of tying a blue sash about a tempting waist. Parthenia Ann, prayer book clasped in mitted hands, walked sedately home with her father. The vivacious little Andy Hawks, drifting up into Massachusetts one summer, on a visit to fishermen kin, had encountered the father, and, through him, the daughter. He had eaten her light flaky biscuit, her golden-brown fries; her ruddy jell; her succulent pickles; her juicy pies. He had stood in her kitchen doorway, shyly yet boldly watching her as she moved briskly from table to stove, from stove to pantry. The sleeves of her crisp print dress were rolled to the elbow, and if those elbows were not dimpled they were undeniably expert in batter-beating, dough-kneading, pan-scouring. Her sallow cheeks were usually a little flushed with the heat of the kitchen and the energy of her movements, and, perhaps, with the consciousness of the unaccustomed masculine eye so warmly turned upon her. She looked her bustling best, and to little impulsive warm-hearted Andy she represented all he had ever known and dreamed, in his roving life, of order, womanliness, comfort. She was some years older than he. The intolerance with which women of Parthenia Ann’s type regard all men was heightened by this fact to something resembling contempt. Even before their marriage, she bossed him about much as she did her old father, but while she nagged she also fed them toothsome viands, and the balm of bland, well-cooked food counteracted the acid of her words. Then, too, Nature, the old witch-wanton, had set the yeast to working in the flabby dough of Parthy Ann’s organism. Andy told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. The first time he kissed this tall, raw-boned New England woman he was startled at the robustness with which she met and returned the caress. They were married and went to Illinois to live in the little town of Thebes, on the Mississippi. In the village from which she had married it was said that, after she left, her old father, naturally neat and trained through years of nagging to super-neatness, indulged in an orgy of disorder that lasted days. As other men turn to strong drink in time of exuberance or relief from strain, so the tidy old septuagenarian strewed the kitchen with dirty dishes and scummy pots and pans; slept for a week in an unmade bed; padded in stocking feet; chewed tobacco and spat where he pleased; smoked the lace curtains brown; was even reported by a spying neighbour to have been seen seated at the reedy old cottage organ whose palsied pipes had always quavered to hymn tunes, picking out with one gnarled forefinger the chorus of a bawdy song. He lived one free, blissful year and died of his own cooking.

As pilot, river captain, and finally, as they thrived, owner and captain of a steamer accommodating both passengers and freight, Captain Andy was seldom in a position to be guilty of tracking the white-scoured kitchen floor or discolouring with pipe smoke the stiff folds of the window curtains. The prim little Illinois cottage saw him but rarely during the season when river navigation was at its height. For many months in the year Parthy Ann Hawks was free to lead the spinsterish existence for which nature had so evidently planned her. Her window panes glittered, her linen was immaculate, her floors unsullied. When Captain Andy came home there was constant friction between them. Sometimes her gay, capering little husband used to look at this woman as at a stranger. Perhaps his nervous habit of clawing at his mutton-chop whiskers had started as a gesture of puzzlement or despair.

The child Magnolia was not born until seven years after their marriage. That Parthy Ann Hawks could produce actual offspring was a miracle to give one renewed faith in certain disputed incidents recorded in the New Testament. The child was all Andy—manner, temperament, colouring. Between father and daughter there sprang up such a bond of love and understanding as to make their relation a perfect thing, and so sturdy as successfully to defy even the destructive forces bent upon it by Mrs. Hawks. Now the little captain came home whenever it was physically possible, sacrificing time, sleep, money—everything but the safety of his boat and its passengers—for a glimpse of the child’s piquant face, her gay vivacious manner, her smile that wrung you even then.

It was years before Captain Andy could persuade his wife to take a river trip with him on his steamer down to New Orleans and back again, bringing the child. It was, of course, only a ruse for having the girl with him. River captains’ wives were not popular on the steamers their husbands commanded. And Parthy Ann, from that first trip, proved a terror. It was due only to tireless threats, pleadings, blandishments, and actual bribes on the part of Andy that his crew did not mutiny daily. Half an hour after embarking on that first trip, Parthy Ann poked her head into the cook’s galley and told him the place was a disgrace. The cook was a woolly-headed black with a rolling protuberant eye and the quick temper of his calling.

Furthermore, though a capable craftsman, and in good standing on the river boats, he had come aboard drunk, according to time-honoured custom; not drunk to the point of being quarrelsome or incompetent, but entertaining delusions of grandeur, varied by ominous spells of sullen silence. In another twelve hours, and for the remainder of the trip, he would be sober and himself. Captain Andy knew this, understood him, was satisfied with him.

Now one of his minions was seated on an upturned pail just outside the door, peeling a great boiler full of potatoes with almost magic celerity and very little economy.

Parthy Ann’s gimlet eye noted the plump peelings as they fell in long spirals under the sharp blade. She lost no time.

“Well, I declare! Of all the shameful waste I ever clapped my eyes on, that’s the worst.”

The black at the stove turned to face her, startled and uncomprehending. Visitors were not welcome in the cook’s galley. He surveyed without enthusiasm the lean figure with the long finger pointing accusingly at a quite innocent pan of potato parings.

“Wha’ that you say, missy?”

“Don’t you missy me!” snapped Parthy Ann Hawks. “And what I said was that I never saw such criminal waste as those potato parings. An inch thick if they’re a speck, and no decent cook would allow it.”

A simple, ignorant soul, the black man, and a somewhat savage; as mighty in his small domain as Captain Andy in his larger one. All about him now were his helpers, black men like himself, with rolling eyes and great lips all too ready to gash into grins if this hard-visaged female intruder were to worst him.

“Yo-all passenger on this boat, missy?”

Parthy Ann surveyed disdainfully the galley’s interior, cluttered with the disorder attendant on the preparation of the noonday meal.

“Passenger! H’mph! No, I’m not. And passenger or no passenger, a filthier hole I never saw in my born days. I’ll let you know that I shall make it my business to report this state of things to the Captain. Good food going to waste——”

A red light seemed to leap then from the big Negro’s eyeballs. His lips parted in a kind of savage and mirthless grin, so that you saw his great square gleaming teeth and the blue gums above them. Quick as a panther he reached down with one great black paw into the pan of parings, straightened, and threw the mass, wet and slimy as it was, full at her. The spirals clung and curled about her—on her shoulders, around her neck, in the folds of her gown, on her head, Medusa-like.

“They’s something for you take to the Captain to show him, missy.”

He turned sombrely back to his stove. The other blacks were little less grave than he. They sensed something sinister in the fury with which this garbage-hung figure ran screaming to the upper deck. The scene above decks must have been a harrowing one.

They put him off at Memphis and shipped another cook there, and the big Negro, thoroughly sobered now, went quite meekly down the gangplank and up the levee, his carpet bag in hand. In fact, it was said that, when he had learned it was the Captain’s wife whom he had treated thus, he had turned a sort of ashen gray and had tried to jump overboard and swim ashore. The gay little Captain Andy was a prime favourite with his crew. Shamefaced though the Negro was, there appeared something akin to pity in the look he turned on Captain Andy as he was put ashore. If that was true, then the look on the little captain’s face as he regarded the miscreant was certainly born of an inward and badly concealed admiration. It was said, too, but never verified, that something round and gold and gleaming was seen to pass from the Captain’s hairy little brown hand to the big black paw.

For the remainder of the trip Mrs. Hawks constituted herself a sort of nightmarish housekeeper, prowling from corridor to cabins, from dining saloon to pantry. She made life wretched for the pert yellow wenches who performed the cabin chamber-work. She pounced upon them when they gathered in little whispering groups, gossiping. Thin-lipped and baleful of eye, she withered the very words they were about to utter to a waiter or deck-hand, so that the flowers of coquetry became ashes on their tongues. She regarded the female passengers with suspicion and the males with contempt. This was the latter ’70s, and gambling was as much a part of river-boat life as eating and drinking. Professional gamblers often infested the boats. It was no uncommon sight to see a poker game that had started in the saloon in the early evening still in progress when sunrise reddened the river. It was the day of the flowing moustache, the broad-brimmed hat, the open-faced collar, and the diamond stud. It constituted masculine America’s last feeble flicker of the picturesque before he sank for ever into the drab ashes of uniformity. A Southern gentleman, particularly, clad thus, took on a dashing and dangerous aspect. The rakish angle of the hat with its curling brim, the flowing ends of the string tie, the movement of the slender virile fingers as they stroked the moustache, all were things to thrill the feminine beholder. Even that frigid female, Parthenia Ann Hawks, must have known a little flutter of the senses as she beheld these romantic and—according to her standards—dissolute passengers seated, silent, wary, pale, about the gaming table. But in her stern code, that which thrilled was wicked. She belonged to the tribe of the Knitting Women; of the Salem Witch Burners; of all fanatics who count nature as an enemy to be suppressed; and in whose veins the wine of life runs vinegar. If the deep seepage of Parthy Ann’s mind could have been brought to the surface, it would have analyzed chemically thus: “I find these men beautiful, stirring, desirable. But that is an abomination. I must not admit to myself that I am affected thus. Therefore I think and I say that they are disgusting, ridiculous, contemptible.”

Her attitude was somewhat complicated by the fact that, as wife of the steamer’s captain, she was treated with a courtly deference on the part of these very gentlemen whom she affected to despise; and with a gracious cordiality by their ladies. The Southern men, especially, gave an actual effect of plumes on their wide-brimmed soft hats as they bowed and addressed her in their soft drawling vernacular.

“Well, ma’am, and how are you enjoying your trip on your good husband’s magnificent boat?” It sounded much richer and more flattering as they actually said it. “. . . Yo’ trip on yo’ good husband’s ma-a-a-yg-nif’cent . . .” They gave one the feeling that they were really garbed in satin, sword, red heels, lace ruffles.

Parthenia Ann, whose stays always seemed, somehow, to support her form more stiffly than did those of any other female, would regard her inquirers with a cold and fishy eye.

“The boat’s well enough, I suppose. But what with the carousing by night and the waste by day, a Christian soul can hardly look on at it without feeling that some dreadful punishment will overtake us all before we arrive at the end of our journey.” From her tone you would almost have gathered that she hoped it.

He of the broad-brimmed hat, and his bustled, basqued alpaca lady, would perhaps exchange a glance not altogether amused. Collisions, explosions, snag-founderings were all too common in the river traffic of the day to risk this deliberate calling down of wrath.

Moving away, the soft-tongued Southern voices would be found to be as effective in vituperation as in flattery. “Pole cat!” he of the phantom plumes would say, aside, to his lady.

Fortunately, Parthy Ann’s dour misgivings did not materialize. The trip downstream proved a delightful one, and as tranquil as might be with Mrs. Hawks on board. Captain Andy’s steamer, though by no means as large as some of the so-called floating palaces that plied the Mississippi, was known for the excellence of its table, the comfort of its appointments, and the affability of its crew. So now the passengers endured the irritation of Mrs. Hawks’ presence under the balm of appetizing food and good-natured service. The crew suffered her nagging for the sake of the little captain, whom they liked and respected; and for his wages, which were generous.

Though Parthenia Ann Hawks regarded the great river—if, indeed, she noticed it at all—merely as a moist highway down which one travelled with ease to New Orleans; untouched by its mystery, unmoved by its majesty, unsubdued by its sinister power, she must still, in spite of herself, have come, however faintly and remotely, under the spell of its enchantment. For this trip proved, for her, to be the first of many, and led, finally, to her spending seven months out of the twelve, not only on the Mississippi, but on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. Indeed, her liking for the river life, together with her zeal for reforming it, became so marked that in time river travellers began to show a preference for steamers other than Captain Andy’s, excellently though they fared thereon.

Perhaps the attitude of the lady passengers toward the little captain and the manner of the little captain as he addressed the lady passengers did much to feed the flame of Parthy Ann’s belligerence. Until the coming of Andy Hawks she had found favour in no man’s eyes. Cut in the very pattern of spinsterhood, she must actually have had moments of surprise and even incredulity at finding herself a wife and mother. The art of coquetry was unknown to her; because the soft blandishments of love had early been denied her she now repudiated them as sinful; did her hair in a knob; eschewed flounces; assumed a severe demeanour; and would have been the last to understand that any one of these repressions was a confession. All about her—and Captain Andy—on the steamship were captivating females, full of winning wiles; wives of Southern planters; cream-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, indolent, heavy-lidded, bewitching; or women folk of prosperous Illinois or Iowa merchants, lawyers, or manufacturers making a pleasure jaunt of the Southern business trip with husband or father.

And, “Oh, Captain Hawks!” they said; and, “Oh, Captain Andy! Do come here like a nice man and tell us what it means when that little bell rings so fast? . . . And why do they call it the hurricane deck? . . . Oh, Captain Hawks, is that a serpent tattooed on the back of your hand! I declare it is! Look, Emmaline! Emmaline, look! This naughty Captain Andy has a serpent . . .”

Captain Andy’s social deportment toward women was made up of that most devastating of combinations, a deferential manner together with an audacious tongue. A tapering white finger, daringly tracing a rosy nail over the blue coils of the tattooed serpent, would find itself gently imprisoned beneath the hard little brown paw that was Andy’s free hand.

“After this,” the little captain would say, thoughtfully, “it won’t be long before that particular tattoo will be entirely worn away. Yes, ma’am! No more serpent.”

“But why?”

“Erosion, ma’am.”

“E—but I don’t understand. I’m so stupid. I——”

Meltingly, the wicked little monkey, “I’ll be so often kissing the spot your lovely finger has traced, ma’am.”

“Oh-h-h-h!” A smart tap of rebuke with her palm-leaf fan. “You are a saucy thing. Emmaline, did you hear what this wicked captain said!”

Much of the freedom that Magnolia enjoyed on this first trip she owed to her mother’s quivering preoccupation with these vivacious ladies.

If the enchantment of the river had been insidious enough to lure even Mrs. Hawks, certainly the child Magnolia fell completely under its magic spell. From that first trip on the Mississippi she was captive in its coils. Twenty times daily, during that leisurely journey from St. Louis to New Orleans, Mrs. Hawks dragged her child, squirming and protesting, from the pilot house perched atop the steamer or from the engine room in its bowels. Refurbished, the grime removed from face and hands, dressed in a clean pinafore, she was thumped on one of the red-plush fauteuils of the gaudy saloon. Magnolia’s hair was almost black and without a vestige of natural curl. This last was a great cross to Mrs. Hawks, who spent hours wetting and twining the long dank strands about her forefinger with a fine-toothed comb in an unconvincing attempt to make a swan out of her duckling. The rebellious little figure stood clamped between her mother’s relentless knees. Captured thus, and made fresh, her restless feet in their clean white stockings and little strapped black slippers sticking straight out before her, her starched skirts stiffly spread, she was told to conduct herself as a young lady of her years and high position should.

“Listen to the conversation of the ladies and gentlemen about you,” Mrs. Hawks counselled her, severely, “instead of to the low talk of those greasy engineers and pilots you’re always running off to. I declare I don’t know what your father is thinking of, to allow it. . . . Or read your book. . . . Then where is it? Where is the book I bought you especially to read on this trip? You haven’t opened it, I’ll be bound. . . . Go get it and come back directly.”

A prissy tale about a female Rollo so prim that Magnolia was sure she turned her toes out even in her sleep. When she returned with a book (if she returned at all) it was likely to be of a quite different sort—a blood-curdling tale of the old days of river banditry—a story, perhaps, of the rapacious and brutal Murrel and his following of ten hundred cut-throats sworn to do his evil will; and compared to whom Jesse James was a philanthropist. The book would have been loaned her by one of the crew. She adored these bloody tales and devoured them with the avidity that she always showed for any theme that smacked of the river. It was snatched away soon enough when it came under her mother’s watchful eye.

Magnolia loathed the red plush and gilt saloon except at night, when its gilding and mirrors took on a false glitter and richness from the kerosene lamps that filled wall brackets and chandeliers. Then it was that the lady passengers, their daytime alpacas and serges replaced by silks, sat genteelly conversing, reading, or embroidering. Then, if ever, the gentlemen twirled their mustachios most fiercely so that the diamond on the third finger of the right hand sparkled entrancingly. Magnolia derived a sensory satisfaction from the scene. The rich red of the carpet fed her, and the yellow glow of the lamps. In her best cashmere dress of brown with the polonaise cut up the front and around the bottom in deep turrets she sat alertly watching the elaborate posturings of the silken ladies and the broadcloth gentlemen.

Sometimes one of the ladies sang to the hoarse accompaniment of the ship’s piano, whose tones always sounded as though the Mississippi River mist had lodged permanently in its chords. The Southern ladies rendered tinkling and sentimental ballads. The Mid-western wives were wont to deliver themselves of songs of a somewhat sterner stuff. There was one song in particular, sung by a plain and falsetto lady hailing from Iowa, that aroused in Magnolia a savage (though quite reasoning) loathing. It was entitled Waste Not, Want Not; Or: You Never Miss The Water Till The Well Runs Dry. Not being a psychologist, Magnolia did not know why, during the rendition of the first verse and the chorus, she always longed to tear her best dress into ribbons and throw a barrel of flour and a dozen hams into the river. The song ran:

When a child I lived at Lincoln,

With my parents at the farm,

The lessons that my mother taught,

To me were quite a charm.

She would often take me on her knee,

When tired of childish play,

And as she press’d me to her breast,

I’ve heard my mother say:

Chorus: Waste not, want not, is a maxim I would teach——

Escape to the decks or the pilot house was impossible of accomplishment by night. She extracted what savour she could from the situation. This, at least, was better than being sent off to bed. All her disorderly life Magnolia went to bed only when all else failed. Then, too, once in her tiny cabin she could pose and swoop before the inadequate mirror in pitiless imitation of the arch alpacas and silks of the red plush saloon; tapping an imaginary masculine shoulder with a phantom fan; laughing in an elegant falsetto; grimacing animatedly as she squeaked, “Deah, yes!” and “Deah, no!” moistening a forelock of her straight black hair with a generous dressing of saliva wherewith to paste flat to her forehead the modish spit-curl that graced the feminine adult coiffure.

But during the day she and her father often contrived to elude the maternal duenna. With her hand in that of the little captain, she roamed the boat from stem to stern, from bunkers to pilot house. Down in the engine room she delightedly heard the sweating engineer denounce the pilot, decks above him, as a goddam Pittsburgh brass pounder because that monarch, to achieve a difficult landing, had to ring more bells than the engineer below thought necessary to an expert. But best of all Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled; sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you—that is, Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. The river curved and twisted and turned and doubled. Mystery always lay just around the corner of the next bend. But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper, the chief pilot, always knew. You couldn’t believe that it was possible for any human brain to remember the things that Captain Andy and Mr. Pepper knew about that treacherous, shifting, baffling river. Magnolia delighted to test them. She played a game with Mr. Pepper and with her father, thus:

“What’s next?”

“Kinney’s woodpile.”

“Now what?”

“Ealer’s Bend.”

“What’ll be there, when we come round that corner?”

“Patrie’s Plantation.”

“What’s around that bend?”

“An old cottonwood with one limb hanging down, struck by lightning.”

“What’s coming now?”

“A stump sticking out of the water at Higgin’s Point.”

They always were right. It was magic. It was incredible. They knew, too, the depth of the water. They could point out a spot and say, “That used to be an island—Buckle’s Island.”

“But it’s water! It couldn’t be an island. It’s water. We’re—why, we’re riding on it now.”

Mr. Pepper would persist, unmoved. “Used to be an island.” Or, pointing again, “Two years ago I took her right down through there where that point lays.”

“But it’s dry land. You’re just fooling, aren’t you, Mr. Pepper? Because you couldn’t take a boat on dry land. It’s got things growing on it! Little trees, even. So how could you?”

“Water there two years ago—good eleven foot.”

Small wonder Magnolia was early impressed with this writhing monster that, with a single lash of its tail, could wipe a solid island from the face of the earth, or with a convulsion of its huge tawny body spew up a tract of land where only water had been.

Mr. Pepper had respect for his river. “Yessir, the Mississippi and this here Nile, over in Egypt, they’re a couple of old demons. I ain’t seen the Nile River, myself. Don’t expect to. This old river’s enough for one man to meet up with in his life. Like marrying. Get to learn one woman’s ways real good, you know about all there is to women and you got about all you can do one lifetime.”

Not at all the salty old graybeard pilot of fiction, this Mr. Pepper. A youth of twenty-four, nerveless, taciturn, gentle, profane, charming. His clear brown eyes, gazing unblinkingly out upon the river, had tiny golden flecks in them, as though something of the river itself had taken possession of him, and become part of him. Born fifty years later, he would have been the steel stuff of which aviation aces are made.

Sometimes, in deep water, Mr. Pepper actually permitted Magnolia to turn the great pilot wheel that measured twice as high as she. He stood beside her, of course; or her father, if he chanced to be present, stood behind her. It was thrilling, too, when her father took the wheel in an exciting place—where the water was very shoal, perhaps; or where the steamer found a stiff current pushing behind her, and the tricky dusk coming on. At first it puzzled Magnolia that her father, omnipotent in all other parts of the Creole Belle, should defer to this stripling; should actually be obliged, on his own steamer, to ask permission of the pilot to take the wheel. They were both beautifully formal and polite about it.

“What say to my taking her a little spell, Mr. Pepper?”

“Not at all, Captain Hawks. Not at all, sir,” Mr. Pepper would reply, cordially if ambiguously. His gesture as he stepped aside and relinquished the wheel was that of one craftsman who recognizes and respects the ability of another. Andy Hawks had been a crack Mississippi River pilot in his day. And then to watch Captain Andy skinning the wheel—climbing it round and round, hands and feet, and looking for all the world like a talented little monkey.

Magnolia even learned to distinguish the bells by tone. There was the Go Ahead, soprano-voiced. Mr. Pepper called it the Jingle. He explained to Magnolia:

“When I give the engineer the Jingle, why, he knows I mean for him to give her all she’s got.” Strangely enough, the child, accustomed to the sex of boats and with an uncannily quick comprehension of river jargon, understood him, nodded her head so briskly that the hand-made curls jerked up and down like bell-ropes. “Sometimes it’s called the Soprano. Then the Centre Bell—the Stopping Bell—that’s middle tone. About alto. This here, that’s the Astern Bell—the backup bell. That’s bass. The Boom-Boom, you call it. Here’s how you can remember them: The Jingle, the Alto, and the Boom-Boom.”

A charming medium through which to know the river, Mr. Pepper. An enchanting place from which to view the river, that pilot house. Magnolia loved its shining orderliness, disorderly little creature that she was. The wilderness of water and woodland outside made its glass-enclosed cosiness seem the snugger. Oilcloth on the floor. You opened the drawer of the little table and there lay Mr. Pepper’s pistol, glittering and sinister; and Mr. Pepper’s Pilot Rules. Magnolia lingered over the title printed on the brick-coloured paper binding:

PILOT RULES

FOR THE

RIVERS WHOSE WATERS FLOW INTO THE GULF OF

MEXICO AND THEIR TRIBUTARIES

AND FOR

THE RED RIVER OF THE NORTH

The Red River of the North! There was something in the words that thrilled her; sent little delicious prickles up and down her spine.

There was a bright brass cuspidor. The expertness with which Mr. Pepper and, for that matter, Captain Hawks himself, aimed for the centre of this glittering receptacle and sustained a one-hundred-per-cent. record was as fascinating as any other feature of this delightful place. Visitors were rarely allowed up there. Passengers might peer wistfully through the glass enclosure from the steps below, but there they were confronted by a stern and forbidding sign which read: No Visitors Allowed. Magnolia felt very superior and slightly contemptuous as she looked down from her vantage point upon these unfortunates below. Sometimes, during mid-watch, a very black texas-tender in a very white starched apron would appear with coffee and cakes or ices for Mr. Pepper. Magnolia would have an ice, too, shaving it very fine to make it last; licking the spoon luxuriously with little lightning flicks of her tongue and letting the frozen sweet slide, a slow delicious trickle, down her grateful throat.

“Have another cake, Miss Magnolia,” Mr. Pepper would urge her. “A pink one, I’d recommend, this time.”

“I don’t hardly think my mother——”

Mr. Pepper, himself, surprisingly enough, the father of twins, was sure her mother would have no objection; would, if present, probably encourage the suggestion. Magnolia bit quickly into the pink cake. A wild sense of freedom flooded her. She felt like the river, rushing headlong on her way.

To be snatched from this ecstatic state was agony. The shadow of the austere and disapproving maternal figure loomed always just around the corner. At any moment it might become reality. The knowledge that this was so made Magnolia’s first taste of Mississippi River life all the more delicious.

III

Grim force though she was, it would be absurd to fix upon Parthy Ann Hawks as the sole engine whose relentless functioning cut down the profits of Captain Andy’s steamboat enterprise. That other metal monster, the railroad, with its swift-turning wheels and its growing network of lines, was weaving the doom of river traffic. The Prince Albert coats and the alpaca basques were choosing a speedier, if less romantic, way to travel from Natchez to Memphis, or from Cairo to Vicksburg. Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa business men were favouring a less hazardous means of transporting their merchandise. Farmers were freighting their crops by land instead of water. The river steamboat was fast becoming an anachronism. The jig, Captain Andy saw, was up. Yet the river was inextricably interwoven with his life—was his life, actually. He knew no other background, was happy in no other surroundings, had learned no other trade. These streams, large and small of the North, the Mid-west, the South, with their harsh yet musical Indian names—Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Yazoo, Monongahela, Kanawha—he knew in every season: their currents, depths, landings, banks, perils. The French strain in him on the distaff side did not save him from pronouncing the foreign names of Southern rivers as murderously as did the other rivermen. La Fourche was the Foosh. Bayou Teche was Bayo Tash. As for names such as Plaquemine, Paincourteville, and Thibodaux—they emerged mutilated beyond recognition, with entire syllables lopped off, and flat vowels protruding everywhere. Anything else would have been considered affected.

Captain Andy thought only in terms of waterways. Despite the prim little house in Thebes, home, to Andy, was a boat. Towns and cities were to him mere sources of supplies and passengers, set along the river banks for the convenience of steamboats. He knew every plank in every river-landing from St. Paul to Baton Rouge. As the sky is revealed, a printed page, to the astronomer, so Andy Hawks knew and interpreted every reef, sand bar, current, and eddy in the rivers that drained the great Mississippi Basin. And of these he knew best of all the Mississippi herself. He loved her, feared her, respected her. Now her courtiers and lovers were deserting her, one by one, for an iron-throated, great-footed, brazen-voiced hussy. Andy, among the few, remained true.

To leave the river—to engage, perforce, in some landlubberly pursuit was to him unthinkable. On the rivers he was a man of consequence. As a captain and pilot of knowledge and experience his opinion was deferred to. Once permanently ashore, penduluming prosaically between the precise little household and some dull town job, he would degenerate and wither until inevitably he who now was Captain Andy Hawks, owner and master of the steamboat Creole Belle, would be known merely as the husband of Parthy Ann Hawks, that Mistress of the Lace Curtains, Priestess of the Parlour Carpet, and Keeper of the Kitchen Floor. All this he did not definitely put into words; but he sensed it.

He cast about in his alert mind, and made his plans craftily, and put them warily, for he knew the force of Parthenia’s opposition.

“I see here where old Ollie Pegram’s fixing to sell his show boat.” He was seated in the kitchen, smoking his pipe and reading the local newspaper. “Cotton Blossom, she’s called.”

Parthy Ann was not one to simulate interest where she felt none. Bustling between stove and pantry she only half heard him. “Well, what of it?”

Captain Andy rattled the sheet he was holding, turned a page leisurely, meanwhile idly swinging one leg, as he sat with knees crossed. Each movement was calculated to give the effect of casualness.

“Made a fortune in the show-boat business, Ollie has. Ain’t a town on the river doesn’t wait for the Cotton Blossom. Yessir. Anybody buys that outfit is walking into money.”

“Scallywags.” Thus, succinctly, Parthenia thought to dismiss the subject while voicing her opinion of water thespians.

“Scallywags nothing! Some of the finest men on the river in the show-boat business. Look at Pegram! Look at Finnegan! Look at Hosey Watts!”

It was Mrs. Hawks’ habit to express contempt by reference to a ten-foot pole, this being an imaginary implement of disdain and a weapon of defence which was her Excalibur. She now announced that not only would she decline to look at the above-named gentlemen, but that she could not be induced to touch any of them with a ten-foot pole. She concluded with the repetitious “Scallywags!” and evidently considered the subject closed.

Two days later, the first pang of suspicion darted through her when Andy renewed the topic with an assumption of nonchalance that failed to deceive her this time. It was plain to this astute woman that he had been thinking concentratedly about show boats since their last brief conversation. It was at supper. Andy should have enjoyed his home-cooked meals more than he actually did. They always were hot, punctual, palatable. Parthenia had kept her cooking hand. Yet he often ate abstractedly and unappreciatively. Perhaps he missed the ceremony, the animation, the sociability that marked the meal hours in the dining saloon of the Creole Belle. The Latin in him, and the unconsciously theatrical in him, loved the mental picture of himself in his blue coat with brass buttons and gold braid, seated at the head of the long table while the alpacas twittered, “Do you think so, Captain Hawks?” and the Prince Alberts deferred to him with, “What’s your opinion, sir?” and the soft-spoken black stewards in crackling white jackets bent over him with steaming platters and tureens.

Parthenia did not hold with conversation at meal time. Andy and Magnolia usually carried on such talk as occurred at table. Strangely enough, there was in his tone toward the child none of the usual patronizing attitude of the adult. No what-did-you-learn-at-school; no have-you-been-a-good-girl-to-day. They conversed like two somewhat rowdy grown-ups, constantly chafed by the reprovals of the prim Parthenia. It was a habit of Andy seldom to remain seated in his chair throughout a meal. Perhaps this was due to the fact that he frequently was called away from table while in command of his steamer. At home his jumpiness was a source of great irritation to Mrs. Hawks. Her contributions to the conversation varied little.

“Pity’s sake, Hawks, sit still! That’s the third time you’ve been up and down, and supper not five minutes on the table. . . . Eat your potato, Magnolia, or not a bite of cup cake do you get. . . . That’s a fine story to be telling a child, I must say, Andy Hawks. . . . Can’t you talk of anything but a lot of good-for-nothing drunken river roustabouts! . . . Drink your milk, Maggie. . . . Oh, stop fidgeting, Hawks! . . . Don’t cut away all the fat like that, Magnolia. No wonder you’re so skinny I’m ashamed of you and the neighbours think you don’t get enough to eat.”

Like a swarm of maddening mosquitoes, these admonitions buzzed through and above and around the conversation of the man and the child.

To-night Andy’s talk dwelt on a dramatic incident that had been told him that day by the pilot of the show boat New Sensation, lately burned to the water’s edge. He went on vivaciously, his bright brown eyes sparkling with interest and animation. Now and then, he jumped up from the table the better to illustrate a situation. Magnolia was following his every word and gesture with spellbound attention. She never had been permitted to see a show-boat performance. When one of these gay water travellers came prancing down the river, band playing, calliope tooting, flags flying, towboat puffing, bringing up with a final flare and flourish at the landing, there to tie up for two or three days, or even, sometimes, for a week, Magnolia was admonished not to go near it. Other children of the town might swarm over it by day, enchanted by its mystery, enthralled by its red-coated musicians when the band marched up the main street; might even, at night, witness the performance of a play and actually stay for the song-and-dance numbers which comprised the “concert” held after the play, and for which an additional charge of fifteen cents was made.

Magnolia hungered for a glimpse of these forbidden delights. The little white house at Thebes commanded a view up the river toward Cape Girardeau. At night from her bedroom window she could see the lights shining golden yellow through the boat’s many windows, was fired with excitement at sight of the kerosene flares stuck in the river bank to light the way of the lucky, could actually hear the beat and blare of the band. Again and again, in her very early childhood, the spring nights when the show boats were headed downstream and the autumn nights when they were returning up river were stamped indelibly on her mind as she knelt in her nightgown at the little window of the dark room that faced the river with its dazzling and forbidden spectacle. Her bare feet would be as icy as her cheeks were hot. Her ears were straining to catch the jaunty strains of the music, and her eyes tried to discern the faces that passed under the weird glow of the torch flares. Usually she did not hear the approaching tread of discovery until the metallic, “Magnolia Hawks, get into your bed this very minute!” smote cruelly on her entranced ears. Sometimes she glimpsed men and women of the show-boat troupe on Front Street or Third Street, idling or shopping. Occasionally you saw them driving in a rig hired from Deffler’s Livery Stable. They were known to the townspeople as Show Folks, and the term carried with it the sting of opprobrium. You could mark them by something different in their dress, in their faces, in the way they walked. The women were not always young. Magnolia noticed that often they were actually older than her mother (Parthy was then about thirty-nine). Yet they looked lively and somehow youthful, though their faces bore wrinkles. There was about them a certain care-free gaiety, a jauntiness. They looked, Magnolia decided, as if they had just come from some interesting place and were going to another even more interesting. This was rather shrewd of her. She had sensed that the dulness of village and farm life, the look that routine, drudgery, and boredom stamp indelibly on the countenance of the farm woman or the village housewife, were absent in these animated and often odd faces. Once she had encountered a little group of three—two women and a man—strolling along the narrow plank sidewalk near the Hawks house. They were eating fruit out of a bag, sociably, and spitting out the seeds, and laughing and chatting and dawdling. One of the women was young and very pretty, and her dress, Magnolia thought, was the loveliest she had ever seen. Its skirt of navy blue was kilted in the back, and there were puffs up each side edged with passementerie. On her head, at a saucy angle, was a chip bonnet of blue, trimmed with beaded lace, and ribbon, and adorable pink roses. The other woman was much older. There were queer deep lines in her face—not wrinkles, though Magnolia could not know this, but the scars left when the gashes of experience have healed. Her eyes were deep, and dark, and dead. She was carelessly dressed, and the box-pleated tail of her flounced black gown trailed in the street, so that it was filmed with a gray coating of dust. The veil wound round her bonnet hung down her back, imparting a Spanish and mysterious look. The man, too, though young and tall and not bad-looking, wore an unkempt look. His garments were ill assorted. His collar boasted no cravat. But all three had a charming air of insouciance as they strolled up the tree-shaded village street, laughing and chatting and munching and spitting out cherry stones with a little childish ballooning of the cheeks. Magnolia hung on the Hawks fence gate and stared. The older woman caught her eye and smiled, and immediately Magnolia decided that she liked her better than she did the pretty, young one, so after a moment’s grave inspection she smiled in return her sudden, brilliant wide smile.

“Look at that child,” said the older woman. “All of a sudden she’s beautiful.”

The other two surveyed her idly. Magnolia’s smile had vanished now. They saw a scrawny sallow little girl, big-eyed, whose jaw conformation was too plainly marked, whose forehead was too high and broad, and whose black hair deceived no one into believing that its dank curls were other than tortured.

“You’re crazy, Julie,” remarked the pretty girl, without heat; and looked away, uninterested.

But between Magnolia and the older woman a filament of live liking had leaped. “Hello, little girl,” said the older woman.

Magnolia continued to stare, gravely; said nothing.

“Won’t you say hello to me?” the woman persisted; and smiled again. And again Magnolia returned her smile. “There!” the woman exclaimed, in triumph. “What did I tell you!”

“Cat’s got her tongue,” the sloppy young man remarked as his contribution to the conversation.

“Oh, come on,” said the pretty girl; and popped another cherry into her mouth.

But the woman persisted. She addressed Magnolia gravely. “When you grow up, don’t smile too often; but smile whenever you want anything very much, or like any one, or want them to like you. But I guess maybe you’ll learn that without my telling you. . . . Listen, won’t you say hello to me? H’m?”

Magnolia melted. “I’m not allowed,” she explained.

“Not——? Why not? Pity’s sake!”

“Because you’re show-boat folks. My mama won’t let me talk to show-boat folks.”

“Damned little brat,” said the pretty girl, and spat out a cherry stone. The man laughed.

With a lightning gesture the older woman took off her hat, stuffed it under the man’s arm, twisted her abundant hair into a knob off her face, pulled down her mouth and made a narrow line of her lips, brought her elbows sharply to her side, her hands clasped, her shoulders suddenly pinched.

“Your mama looks like this,” she said.

“Why, how did you know!” cried Magnolia, amazed. The three burst into sudden loud laughter. And at that Parthy Hawks appeared at the door, bristling, protective.

“Maggie Hawks, come into the house this minute!”

The laughter of the three then was redoubled. The quiet little village street rang with it as they continued their leisurely care-free ramble up the sun-dappled leafy path.

Now her father, at supper, had a tale to tell of these forbidden fascinators. The story had been told him that afternoon by Hard Harry Swager, river pilot, just in at the landing after a thrilling experience.

“Seems they were playing at China Grove, on the Chappelia. Yessir. Well, this girl—La Verne, her name was, or something—anyway, she was on the stage singing, he says. It was the concert, after the show. She comes off and the next thing you know there’s a little blaze in the flies. Next minute she was afire and no saving her.” To one less initiated it might have been difficult to differentiate in his use of the pronoun, third person, feminine. Sometimes he referred to the girl, sometimes to the boat. “Thirty years old if she’s a day and burns like greased paper. Went up in ten minutes. Hard Harry goes running to the pilot house to get his clothes. Time he reaches the boiler deck, fire has cut off the gangway. He tries to lower himself twelve feet from the boiler deck to the main, and falls and breaks his leg. By that time they were cutting the towboat away from the Sensation to save her. Did save her, too, finally. But the Sensation don’t last long’s it takes to tell it. Well, there he was, and what did they have to do but send four miles inland for a doctor, and when he comes, the skunk, guess what?”

“What!” cries Magnolia not merely to be obliging in this dramatic crisis, but because she is frantic to know. Captain Andy is on his feet by this time, fork in hand.

“When the doc comes he takes a look around, and there they all are in any kind of clothes they could grab or had on. So he says he won’t set the leg unless he’s paid in advance, twenty-five dollars. ‘Oh, you won’t, won’t you!’ says Hard Harry, laying there with his broken leg. And draws. ‘You’ll set it or I’ll shoot yours off so you won’t ever walk again, you son of a bitch!’ ”

“Captain Andy Hawks!”

He has acted it out. The fork is his gun. Magnolia is breathless. Now both gaze, stricken, at Mrs. Hawks. Their horror is not occasioned by the word spoken but by the interruption.

“Go on!” shouts Magnolia; and bounces up and down in her chair. “Go on!”

But the first fine histrionic flavour has been poisoned by that interruption. Andy takes his seat at table. He resumes the eating of his pork steak and potatoes, but listlessly. Perhaps he is a little ashamed of the extent to which he has been carried away by his own recital. “Slipped out,” he mumbled.

“Well, I should say as much!” Parthy retorted, ambiguously. “What kind of language can a body expect, you hanging around show-boat riff-raff.”

Magnolia would not be cheated of her dénouement. “But did he? Did he shoot it off, or did he fix it, or what? What did he do?”

“He set it, all right. They gave him his twenty-five and told him to get the h—— out of there, and he got. But they had to get the boat out—the towboat they’d saved—and no pilot but Hard Harry. So next day they put him on the hurricane deck, under a tarpaulin because the rain was pouring the way it does down there worse than any place in the world, just about. And with two men steering, he brings the boat to Baton Rouge seventy-five miles through bayou and Mississippi. Yessir.”

Magnolia breathed again.

“And who’s this,” demanded Mrs. Hawks, “was telling you all this fol-de-rol, did you say?”

“Swager himself. Harry. Hard Harry Swager, they call him.” (You could see the ten-foot pole leap of itself into Mrs. Hawks’ hand as her fingers drummed the tablecloth.) “I was talking to him to-day. Here of late he’s been with the New Sensation. He piloted the Cotton Blossom for years till Pegram decided to quit. Well, sir! He says five hundred people a night on the show boat was nothing, and eight hundred on Saturday nights in towns with a good back-country. Let me tell you right here and now that runs into money. Say a quarter of ’em’s fifty centers, a half thirty-five, and the rest twenty-five. The niggers all twenty-five up in the gallery, course. Naught . . . five times five’s . . . five and carry the two . . . five times two’s ten carry the one . . . five . . .”

Parthy was no fool. She sensed that here threatened a situation demanding measures even more than ordinarily firm.

“I may not know much”—another form of locution often favoured by her. The tone in which it was spoken utterly belied the words; the tone told you that not only did she know much, but all. “I may not know much, but this I do know. You’ve got something better to do with your time than loafing down at the landing like a river rat with that scamp Swager. Hard Harry! He comes honestly enough by that name, I’ll be bound, if he never came honestly by anything else in his life. And before the child, too. Show boats! And language!”

“What’s wrong with show boats?”

“Everything, and more, too. A lot of loose-living worthless scallywags, men and women. Scum, that’s what. Trollops!” Parthy could use a good old Anglo-Saxon word herself, on occasion.

Captain Andy made frantic foray among the whiskers. He clawed like a furious little monkey—always the sign of mental disturbance in him. “No more scum than your own husband, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am. I used to be with a show-boat troupe myself.”

“Pilot, yes.”

“Pilot be damned.” He was up now and capering like a Quilp. “Actor, Mrs. Hawks, and pretty good I was, too, time I was seventeen or eighteen. You ought to’ve seen me in the after-piece. Red Hot Coffee it was called. I played the nigger. Doubled in brass, too. I pounded the bass drum in the band, and it was bigger than me.”

Magnolia was enchanted. She sprang up, flew round to him. “Were you really? An actor? You never told me. Mama, did you know? Did you know Papa was an actor on a show boat?”

Parthy Ann rose in her wrath. Always taller than her husband, she seemed now to tower above him. He defied her, a terrier facing a mastiff.

“What kind of talk is this, Andy Hawks! If you’re making up tales to tease me before the child I’m surprised at you, that thought nothing you could do would ever surprise me again.”

“It’s the truth. The Sunny South, she was called. Captain Jake Bofinger, owner. Married ten times, old Jake was. A pretty rough lot we were in those days, let me tell you. I remember time we——”

“Not another word, Captain Hawks. And let me tell you it’s a good thing for you that you kept it from me all these years. I’d never have married you if I’d known. A show-boat actor!”

“Oh, yes, you would, Parthy. And glad of the chance.”

Words. Bickering. Recriminations. Finally, “I’ll thank you not to mention show boats again in front of the child. You with your La Vernes and your Hard Harrys and your concerts and broken legs and fires and ten wives and language and what not! I don’t want to be dirtied by it, nor the child. . . . Run out and play, Magnolia. . . . And let this be the last of show-boat talk in this house.”

Andy breathed deep, clung with both hands to his whiskers, and took the plunge. “It’s far from being the last of it, Parthy. I’ve bought the Cotton Blossom from Pegram.”

IV

Many quarrels had marked their married life, but this one assumed serious proportions. It was a truly sinister note in the pageant of mismating that passed constantly before Magnolia’s uncomprehending eyes in childhood. Parthenia had opposed him often, and certainly always when a new venture or plan held something of the element of unconventionality. But now the Puritan in her ran rampant. He would disgrace her before the community. He was ruining the life of his child. She would return to her native New England. He would not see Magnolia again. He had explained to her—rather, it had come out piecemeal—that his new project would necessitate his absence from home for months at a time. He would be away, surely, from April until November. If Parthy and the child would live with him on the show boat part of that time—summers—easy life—lots to see—learn the country——

The storm broke, raged, beat about his head, battered his diminutive frame. He clutched his whiskers and hung on for dear life. In the end he won.

All that Parthy ever had in her life of colour, of romance, of change, he brought her. But for him she would still be ploughing through the drifts or mud of the New England road on her way to and from the frigid little schoolhouse. But for him she would still be living her barren spinster life with her salty old father in the grim coast town whence she had come. She was to trail through the vine-hung bayous of Louisiana; float down the generous rivers of the Carolinas, of Tennessee, of Mississippi, with the silver-green weeping willows misting the water’s edge. She was to hear the mellow plaintive voices of Negroes singing on the levees and in cabin doorways as the boat swept by. She would taste exotic fruits; see stirring sights; meet the fantastic figures that passed up and down the rivers like shadows drifting in and out of a weird dream. Yet always she was to resent loveliness; fight the influence of each new experience; combat the lure of each new face. Tight-lipped, belligerent, she met beauty and adventure and defied them to work a change in her.

For three days, then, following Andy’s stupendous announcement, Parthenia threatened to leave him, though certainly, in an age that looked upon the marriage tie as well-nigh indissoluble by any agent other than death, she could not have meant it, straight-laced as she was. For another three days she refused to speak to him, conveying her communications to him through a third person who was, perforce, Magnolia. “Tell your father thus-and-so.” This in his very presence. “Ask your father this-and-that.”

Experience had taught Magnolia not to be bewildered by these tactics; she was even amused, as at a game. But finally the game wearied her; or perhaps, child though she was, an instinctive sympathy between her and her father made her aware of the pain twisting the face of the man. Suddenly she stamped her foot, issued her edict. “I won’t tell him another single word for you. It’s silly. I thought it was kind of fun, but it isn’t. It’s silly for a great big grown-up person like you that’s a million years old.”

Andy was absent from home all day long, and often late into the night. The Cotton Blossom was being overhauled from keel to pilot house. She was lying just below the landing; painters and carpenters were making her shipshape. Andy trotted up and down the town and the river bank, talking, gesticulating, capering excitedly. There were numberless supplies to be ordered; a troupe to be assembled. He was never without a slip of paper on which he figured constantly. His pockets and the lining of his cap bristled with these paper scraps.

One week following their quarrel Parthy Ann began to evidence interest in these negotiations. She demanded details. How much had he paid for that old mass of kindling wood? (meaning, of course, the Cotton Blossom). How many would its theatre seat? What did the troupe number? What was their route? How many deck-hands? One cook or two? Interspersed with these questions were grumblings and dire predictions anent money thrown away; poverty in old age; the advisability of a keeper being appointed for people whose minds had palpably given way. Still, her curiosity was obviously intense.

“Tell you what,” suggested Andy with what he fancied to be infinite craft. “Get your hat on come on down and take a look at her.”

“Never,” said Parthenia; and untied her kitchen apron.

“Well, then, let Magnolia go down and see her. She likes boats, don’t you, Nola? Same’s her pa.”

“H’m! Likely I’d let her go,” sniffed Parthy.

Andy tried another tack. “Don’t you want to come and see where your papa’s going to live all the months and months he’ll be away from you and ma?”

At which Magnolia, with splendid dramatic sense, began to cry wildly and inconsolably. Parthy remained grim. Yet she must have been immediately disturbed, for Magnolia wept so seldom as to be considered a queer child on this count, among many others.

“Hush your noise,” commanded Parthy.

Great sobs racked Magnolia. Andy crudely followed up his advantage. “I guess you’ll forget how your papa looks time he gets back.”

Magnolia, perfectly aware of the implausibility of any such prediction, now hurled herself at her father, wrapped her arms about him, and howled, jerking back her head, beating a tattoo with her heels, interspersing the howls with piteous supplications not to be left behind. She wanted to see the show boat; and, with the delightful memory of the Creole Belle trip fresh in her mind, she wanted to travel on the Cotton Blossom as she had never wanted anything in her life. Her eyes were staring and distended; her fingers clutched; her body writhed; her moans were heart-breaking. She gave a magnificent performance.

Andy tried to comfort her. The howls increased. Parthy tried stern measures. Hysteria. The two united then, and alarm brought pleadings, and pleadings promises, and finally the three sat intertwined, Andy’s arm about Magnolia and Parthenia; Parthenia’s arm embracing Andy and Magnolia; Magnolia clinging to both.

“Come get your hair combed. Mama’ll change your dress. Now stop that crying.” Magnolia had been shaken by a final series of racking sobs, real enough now that the mechanics had been started. Her lower lip quivered at intervals as the wet comb chased the strands of straight black hair around Mrs. Hawks’ expert forefinger. When finally she appeared in starched muslin petticoats and second best plaid serge, there followed behind her Parthy Ann herself bonneted and cloaked for the street. The thing was done. The wife of a showman. The Puritan in her shivered, but her curiosity was triumphant even over this. They marched down Oak Street to the river-landing, the child skipping and capering in her excitement. There was, too, something of elation in Andy’s walk. If it had not been for the grim figure at his side and the restraining hand on his arm, it is not unlikely that the two—father and child—would have skipped and capered together down to the water’s edge. Mrs. Hawks’ tread and mien were those of a matronly Christian martyr on her way to the lions. As they went the parents talked of unimportant things to which Magnolia properly paid no heed, having had her way. . . . Gone most of the time. . . . It wouldn’t hurt her any, I tell you. . . . Learn more in a week than she would in a year out of books. . . . But they ain’t, I tell you. Decent folks as you’d ever want to see. Married couples, most of ’em. . . . What do you think I’m running? A bawdy-boat? . . . Oh, language be damned! . . . Now, Parthy, you’ve got this far, don’t start all over again. . . . There she is! Ain’t she pretty! Look, Magnolia! That’s where you’re going to live. . . . Oh, all right, all right! I was just talking . . .

The Cotton Blossom lay moored to great stobs. Long, and wide and plump and comfortable she looked, like a rambling house that had taken perversely to the nautical life and now lay at ease on the river’s broad breast. She had had two coats of white paint with green trimmings; and not the least of these green trimmings comprised letters, a foot high, that smote Parthy’s anguished eye, causing her to groan, and Magnolia’s delighted gaze, causing her to squeal. There it was in all the finality of painter’s print:

CAPT. ANDY HAWKS COTTON BLOSSOM FLOATING PALACE THEATRE

Parthy gathered her dolman more tightly about her, as though smitten by a chill. The clay banks of the levee were strewn with cinders and ashes for a foothold. The steep sides of a river bank down which they would scramble and up which they would clamber were to be the home path for these three in the years to come.

An awninged upper deck, like a cosy veranda, gave the great flatboat a curiously homelike look. On the main deck, too, the gangplank ended in a forward deck which was like a comfortable front porch. Pillars, adorned with scroll-work, supported this. And there, its mouth open in a half-oval of welcome, was the ticket window through which could be seen the little box office with its desk and chair and its wall rack for tickets. There actually were tickets stuck in this, purple and red and blue. Parthy shut her eyes as at a leprous sight. A wide doorway led into the entrance hall. There again double doors opened to reveal a stairway.

“Balcony stairs,” Andy explained, “and upper boxes. Seat hundred and fifty to two hundred, easy. Niggers mostly, upstairs, of course.” Parthy shuddered. An aisle to the right, an aisle to the left of this stairway, and there was the auditorium of the theatre itself, with its rows of seats and its orchestra pit; its stage, its boxes, its painted curtain raised part way so that you saw only the lower half of the Venetian water scene it depicted; the legs of gondoliers in wooden attitudes; faded blue lagoon; palace steps. Magnolia knew a pang of disappointment. True, the boxes bore shiny brass railings and boasted red plush upholstered seats.

“But I thought it would be all light and glittery and like a fairy tale,” she protested.

“At night,” Andy assured her. He had her warm wriggling little fingers in his. “At night. That’s when it’s like a fairy tale. When the lamps are lighted; and all the people; and the band playing.”

“Where’s the kitchen?” demanded Mrs. Hawks.

Andy leaped nimbly down into the orchestra pit, stooped, opened a little door under the stage, and beckoned. Ponderously Parthy followed. Magnolia scampered after. Dining room and cook’s galley were under the stage. Great cross-beams hung so low that even Andy was forced to stoop a little to avoid battering his head against them. Magnolia could touch them quite easily with her finger-tips. In time it came to seem quite natural to see the company and crew of the Cotton Blossom entering the dining room at meal time humbly bent as though in a preliminary attitude of grace before meat.

There were two long tables, each accommodating perhaps ten; and at the head of the room a smaller table for six.

“This is our table,” Andy announced, boldly, as he indicated the third. Parthy snorted; but it seemed to the sensitive Andy that in this snort there was just a shade less resentment than there might have been. Between dining room and kitchen an opening, the size of a window frame, had been cut in the wall, and the base of this was a broad shelf for convenience in conveying hot dishes from stove to table. As the three passed from dining room to kitchen, Andy tossed over his shoulder further information for the possible approval of the bristling Parthy. “Jo and Queenie—she cooks and he waits and washes up and one thing another—they promised to be back April first, sure. Been with the Cotton Blossom, those two have, ten years and more. Painters been cluttering up here, and what not. And will you look at the way the kitchen looks, spite of ’em. Slick’s a whistle. Look at that stove!” Crafty Andy.

Parthenia Ann Hawks looked at the stove. And what a stove it was! Broad-bosomed, ample, vast, like a huge fertile black mammal whose breast would suckle numberless eager sprawling bubbling pots and pans. It shone richly. Gazing upon this generous expanse you felt that from its source could emerge nothing that was not savoury, nourishing, satisfying. Above it, and around the walls, on hooks, hung rows of pans and kettles of every size and shape, all neatly suspended by their pigtails. Here was the wherewithal for boundless cooking. You pictured whole hams, sizzling; fowls neatly trussed in rows; platoons of brown loaves; hampers of green vegetables; vast plateaus of pies. Crockery, thick, white, coarse, was piled, plate on plate, platter on platter, behind the neat doors of the pantry. A supplementary and redundant kerosene stove stood obligingly in the corner.

“Little hot snack at night, after the show,” Andy explained. “Coffee or an egg, maybe, and no lighting the big wood burner.”

There crept slowly, slowly over Parthy’s face a look of speculation, and this in turn was replaced by an expression that was, paradoxically, at once eager and dreamy. As though aware of this she tried with words to belie her look. “All this cooking for a crowd. Take a mint of money, that’s what it will.”

“Make a mint,” Andy retorted, blithely. A black cat, sleek, lithe, at ease, paced slowly across the floor, stood a moment surveying the two with wary yellow eyes, then sidled toward Parthy and rubbed his arched back against her skirts. “Mouser,” said Andy.

“Scat!” cried Parthy; but her tone was half-hearted, and she did not move away. In her eyes gleamed the unholy light of the housewife who beholds for the first time the domain of her dreams. Jo and Queenie to boss. Wholesale marketing. Do this. Do that. Perhaps Andy, in his zeal, had even overdone the thing a little. Suddenly, “Where’s that child! Where’s—— Oh, my goodness, Hawks!” Visions of Magnolia having fallen into the river. She was, later, always to have visions of Magnolia having fallen into rivers so that Magnolia sometimes fell into them out of sheer perversity as other children, cautioned to remain in the yard, wilfully run away from home.

Andy darted out of the kitchen, through the little rabbit-hutch door. Mrs. Hawks gathered up her voluminous skirts and flew after; scrambled across the orchestra pit, turned at the sound of a voice, Magnolia’s, and yet not Magnolia’s, coming from that portion of the stage exposed below the half-raised curtain. In tones at once throaty, mincing, and falsely elegant—that arrogant voice which is childhood’s unconscious imitation of pretence in its elders—Magnolia was reciting nothing in particular, and bringing great gusto to the rendition. The words were palpably made up as she went along—“Oh, do you rully think so! . . . My little girl is very naughty . . . we are rich, oh dear me yes, ice cream every day for breakfast, dinner, and supper. . . .” She wore her mother’s dolman which that lady had unclasped and left hanging over one of the brass railings of a box. From somewhere she had rummaged a bonnet whose jet aigrette quivered with the earnestness of its wearer’s artistic effort. The dolman trailed in the dust of the floor. Magnolia’s right hand was held in a graceful position, the little finger elegantly crooked.

“Maggie Hawks, will you come down out of there this instant!” Parthy whirled on Andy. “There! That’s what it comes to, minute she sets foot on this sink of iniquity. Play acting!”

Andy clawed his whiskers, chuckling. He stepped to the proscenium and held out his arms for the child and she stood looking down at him, flushed, smiling, radiant. “You’re about as good as your pa was, Nola. And that’s no compliment.” He swung her to the floor, a whirl of dolman, short starched skirt and bonnet askew. Then, as Parthy snatched the dolman from her and glared at the bonnet, he saw that he must create again a favourable impression—contrive a new diversion—or his recent gain was lost. A born showman, Andy.

“Where’d you get that bonnet, Magnolia?”

“In there.” She pointed to one of a row of doors facing them at the rear of the stage. “In one of those little bedrooms—cabins—what are they, Papa?”

“Dressing rooms, Nola, and bedrooms, too. Want to see them, Parthy?” He opened a little door leading from the right-hand box to the stage, crossed the stage followed by the reluctant Parthenia, threw open one of the doors at the back. There was revealed a tiny cabin holding a single bed, a diminutive dresser, and washstand. Handy rows of shelves were fastened to the wall above the bed. Dimity curtains hung at the window. The window itself framed a view of river and shore. A crudely coloured calendar hung on the wall, and some photographs and newspaper clippings, time-yellowed. There was about the little chamber a cosiness, a snugness, and, paradoxically enough, a sense of space. That was the open window, doubtless, with its vista of water and sky giving the effect of freedom.

“Dressing rooms during the performance,” Andy explained, “and bedrooms the rest of the time. That’s the way we work it.”

Mrs. Hawks, with a single glance, encompassed the tiny room and rejected it. “Expect me to live in a cubby-hole like that!” It was, unconsciously, her first admission.

Magnolia, behind her mother’s skirts, was peering, wide-eyed, into the room. “Why, I love it! Why, I’d love to live in it. Why, look, there’s a little bed, and a dresser, and a——”

Andy interrupted hastily. “Course I don’t expect you to live in a cubby-hole, Parthy. No, nor the child, neither. Just you step along with me. Now don’t say anything; and stop your grumbling till you see. Put that bonnet back, Nola, where you got it. That’s wardrobe. Which room’d you get it out of?”

Across the stage, then, up the aisle to the stairway that led to the balcony, Andy leading, Mrs. Hawks following funereally, Magnolia playing a zigzag game between the rows of seats yet managing mysteriously to arrive at the foot of the stairs just as they did. The balcony reached, Magnolia had to be rescued from the death that in Mrs. Hawks’ opinion inevitably would result from her leaning over the railing to gaze enthralled on the auditorium and stage below. “Hawks, will you look at that child! I declare, if I ever get her off this boat alive I’ll never set foot on it again.”

But her tone somehow lacked conviction. And when she beheld those two upper bedrooms forward, leading off the balcony—those two square roomy bedrooms, as large, actually, as her bedroom in the cottage, she was lost. The kitchen had scored. But the bedrooms won. They were connected by a little washroom. Each had two windows. Each held bed, dresser, rocker, stove. Bedraggled dimity curtains hung at the windows. Matting covered the floors. Parthy did an astonishing—though characteristic—thing. She walked to the dresser, passed a practised forefinger over its surface, examined the finger critically, and uttered that universal tongue-and-tooth sound indicating disapproval. “An inch thick,” she then said. “A sight of cleaning this boat will take, I can tell you. Not a curtain in the place but’ll have to come down and washed and starched and ironed.”

Instinct or a superhuman wisdom cautioned Andy to say nothing. From the next room came a shout of joy. “Is this my room? It’s got a chair that rocks and a stove with a res’vore and I can see my whole self in the looking-glass, it’s so big. Is this my room? Is it? Mama!”

Parthy passed into the next room. “We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see.” Andy followed after, almost a-tiptoe; afraid to break the spell with a sudden sound.

“But is it? I want to know. Papa, make her tell me. Look! The window here is a little door. It’s a door and I can go right out on the upstairs porch. And there’s the whole river.”

“I should say as much, and a fine way to fall and drown without anybody being the wiser.”

But the child was beside herself with excitement and suspense. She could endure it no longer; flew to her stern parent and actually shook that adamantine figure in its dolman and bonnet. “Is it? Is it? Is it?”

“We’ll see.” A look, then, of almost comic despair flashed between father and child—a curiously adult look for one of Magnolia’s years. It said: “What a woman this is! Can we stand it? I can only if you can.”

Andy tried suggestion. “Could paint this furniture any colour Nola says——”

“Blue,” put in Magnolia, promptly.

“—and new curtains, maybe, with ribbons to match——” He had, among other unexpected traits, a keen eye for colour and line; a love for fabrics.

Parthy said nothing. Her lips were compressed. The look that passed between Andy and Magnolia now was pure despair, with no humour to relieve it. So they went disconsolately out of the door; crossed the balcony, clumped down the stairs, like mutes at a funeral. At the foot of the stairs they heard voices from without—women’s voices, high and clear—and laughter. The sounds came from the little porch-like deck forward. Parthy swooped through the door; had scarcely time to gaze upon two sprightly females in gay plumage before both fell upon her lawful husband Captain Andy Hawks and embraced him. And the young pretty one kissed him on his left-hand mutton-chop whisker. And the older plain one kissed him on the right-hand mutton-chop whisker. And, “Oh, dear Captain Hawks!” they cried. “Aren’t you surprised to see us! And happy! Do say you’re happy. We drove over from Cairo specially to see you and the Cotton Blossom. Doc’s with us.”