Show Boat (16 page)

The little huddling group seemed visibly to collapse. It was as though an unseen hand had removed a sustaining iron support from the spine of each. Magnolia would have flown to Julie, but Parthy jerked her back. Whispering then; glance of disdain.

“Well, Julie, m’girl,” began Andy Hawks, kindly. Julie turned to him.

“We’re going,” she said, quietly.

The door of Elly’s room burst open. Elly, a rumpled, distraught, unlovely figure, appeared in Julie’s doorway, Schultzy trying in vain to placate her.

“You get out of here!” She turned in a frenzy to Andy. “She gets out of here with that white trash she calls her husband or I go, and so I warn you. She’s black! She’s black! God, I was a fool not to see it all the time. Look at her, the nasty yellow——” A stream of abuse, vile, obscene, born of the dregs of river talk heard through the years, now welled to Elly’s lips, distorting them horribly.

“Come away from here,” Parthy said, through set lips, to Magnolia. And bore the child, protesting, up the aisle and into the security of her own room forward.

“I want to stay with Julie! I want to stay with Julie!” wailed Magnolia, overwrought, as the inexorable hand dragged her up the stairs.

In her tiny disordered room Julie was binding up her
wild hair with a swift twist. She barely glanced at Elly. “Shut that woman up,” she said, quietly. “Tell her I’m going.” She began to open boxes and drawers.

Steve approached Andy, low-voiced. “Cap, take us down as far as Xenia, will you, for God’s sake! Don’t make us get off here.”

“Down as far as Xenia you go,” shouted Captain Andy at the top of his voice, “and anybody in this company don’t like it they’re free to git, bag and baggage, now. We’ll pull out of here now. Xenia by afternoon at four, latest. And you two want to stay the night on board you’re welcome. I’m master of this boat, by God!”

They left, these two, when the
Cotton Blossom
docked at Xenia in the late afternoon. Andy shook hands with them, gravely; and Windy clumped down from the pilot house to perform the same solemn ceremony. You sensed unseen peering eyes at every door and window of the
Cotton Blossom
and the
Mollie Able
.

“How you fixed for money?” Andy demanded, bluntly.

“We’re fixed all right,” Julie replied, quietly. Of the two of them she was the more composed. “We’ve been saving. You took too good care of us on the
Cotton Blossom
. No call to spend our money.” The glance from her dark shadow-encircled eyes was one of utter gratefulness. She took up the lighter pieces of luggage. Steve was weighed down with the others—bulging boxes and carpet bags and bundles—their clothing and their show-boat wardrobe and their pitifully few trinkets and personal belongings. A pin cushion,
very lumpy, that Magnolia had made for her at Christmas a year ago. Photographs of the
Cotton Blossom
. A book of pressed wild flowers. Old newspaper clippings.

Julie lingered. Steve crossed the gangplank, turned, beckoned with his head. Julie lingered. An unspoken question in her eyes.

Andy flushed and scratched the mutton-chop whiskers this side and that. “Well, you know how she is, Julie. She don’t mean no harm. But she didn’t let on to Magnolia just what time you were going. Told her to-morrow, likely. Women folks are funny, that way. She don’t mean no harm.”

“That’s all right,” said Julie; picked up the valises, was at Steve’s side. Together the two toiled painfully up the steep river bank, Steve turning to aid her as best he could. They reached the top of the levee. They stood a moment, breathless; then turned and trudged down the dusty Southern country road, the setting sun in their faces. Julie’s slight figure was bent under the weight of the burden she carried. You saw Steve’s fine blond head turned toward her, tender, concerned, encouraging.

Suddenly from the upper deck that fronted Magnolia’s room and Parthy’s came the sound of screams, a scuffle, a smart slap, feet clattering pell-mell down the narrow wooden balcony stairs. A wild little figure in a torn white frock, its face scratched and tear-stained, its great eyes ablaze in the white face, flew past Andy, across the gangplank, up the levee, down the road. Behind her, belated and panting, came Parthy. Her
hand on her heart, her bosom heaving, she leaned against the inadequate support offered by Andy’s right arm, threatening momentarily to topple him, by her own dead weight, into the river.

“To think that I should live to see the day when—my own child—she slapped me—her mother! I saw them out of the window, so I told her to straighten her bureau drawers—a sight! All of a sudden she heard that woman’s voice, low as it was, and she to the window. When she saw her going she makes for the door. I caught her on the steps, but she was like a wildcat, and raised her hand against me—her own mother—and tore away, with me holding this in my hand.” She held out a fragment of torn white stuff. “Raised her hand against her own——”

Andy grinned. “Good for her.”

“What say, Andy Hawks!”

But Andy refused to answer. His gaze followed the flying little figure silhouetted against the evening sky at the top of the high river bank. The slim sagging figure of the woman and the broad-shouldered figure of the man trudged down the road ahead. The child’s voice could be heard high and clear, with a note of hysteria in it. “Julie! Julie! Wait for me! I want to say goodbye! Julie!”

The slender woman in the black dress turned and made as though to start back and then, with a kind of crazy fear in her pace, began to run away from the pursuing little figure—away from something that she had not the courage to face. And when she saw this Magnolia ran on yet a little while, faltering, and then she
stopped and buried her head in her hands and sobbed. The woman glanced over her shoulder, fearfully. And at what she saw she dropped her bags and bundles in the road and started back toward her, running fleetly in spite of her long ruffled awkward skirts; and she held out her arms long before they were able to reach her. And when finally they came together, the woman dropped on her knees in the dust of the road and gathered the weeping child to her and held her close, so that as you saw them sharply outlined against the sunset the black of the woman’s dress and the white of the child’s frock were as one.

M
AGNOLIA, at fifteen, was a gangling gawky child whose eyes were too big for her face and whose legs were too long for her skirts. She looked, in fact, all legs, eyes, and elbows. It was a constant race between her knees and her skirt hems. Parthy was for ever lengthening frocks. Frequently Magnolia, looking down at herself, was surprised, like Alice in Wonderland after she had eaten the magic currant cake, to discover how far away from her head her feet were. Being possessed of a natural creamy pallor which her mother mistook for lack of red corpuscles, she was dosed into chronic biliousness on cod liver oil, cream, eggs, land butter, all of which she loathed. Then suddenly, at sixteen, legs, elbows, and eyes assumed their natural proportions. Overnight, seemingly, she emerged from adolescence a rather amazing looking young creature with a high broad forehead, a wide mobile mouth, great dark liquid eyes, and a most lovely speaking voice which nobody noticed. Her dress was transformed, with Cinderella-like celerity, from the pinafore to the bustle variety. She was not a beauty. She was, in fact, considered rather plain by the unnoticing. Being hipless and almost boyishly flat of bust in a day when the female form was a thing not only of curves but of loops, she was driven by her mother
into wearing all sorts of pads and ruffled corset covers and contrivances which somehow failed to conceal the slimness of the frame beneath. She was, even at sixteen, what might be termed distinguished-looking. Merely by standing tall, pale, dark-haired, next to Elly, that plump and pretty ingénue was transformed into a dumpy and rather dough-faced blonde in whose countenance selfishness and dissatisfaction were beginning to etch telltale lines.

She had been now almost seven years on the show boat. These seven years had spread a tapestry of life and colour before her eyes. Broad rivers flowing to the sea. Little towns perched high on the river banks or cowering flat and fearful, at the mercy of the waters that often crept like hungry and devouring monsters, stealthily over the levee and into the valley below. Singing Negroes. Fighting whites. Spawning Negroes. A life fantastic, bizarre, peaceful, rowdy, prim, eventful, calm. On the rivers anything might happen and everything did. She saw convict chain gangs working on the roads. Grisly nightmarish figures of striped horror, manacled leg to leg. At night you heard them singing plantation songs in the fitful glare of their camp fires in the woods; simple songs full of hope. Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel? they sang. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Comin’ for to Carry Me Home. In the Louisiana bayou country she saw the Negroes perform that weird religious rite known as a ring shout, semi-savage, hysterical, mesmerizing.

Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri small-town housewives came to be Magnolia’s friends, and even Parthy’s. The
coming of the show boat was the one flash of blazing colour in the drab routine of their existence. To them Schultzy was the John Drew of the rivers, Elly the Lillian Russell. You saw them scudding down the placid tree-shaded streets in their morning ginghams and calicoes, their bits of silver clasped in their work-seamed hands, or knotted into the corner of a handkerchief. Fifty cents for two seats at to-night’s show.

“How are you, Mis’ Hawks?… And the little girl?… My! Look at the way she’s shot up in a year’s time! Well, you can’t call her little girl any more.… I brought you a glass of my homemade damson preserve. I take cup of sugar to cup of juice. Real rich, but it is good if I do say so.… I told Will I was coming to the show every night you were here, and he could like it or lump it. I been saving out of the housekeeping money.”

They brought vast chocolate cakes; batches of cookies; jugs of home-brewed grape wine; loaves of fresh bread; jars of strained honey; stiff tight bunches of garden flowers. Offerings on the shrine of Art.

Periodically Parthy threatened to give up this roving life and take Magnolia with her. She held this as a weapon over Andy’s head when he crossed her will, or displeased her. Immediately boarding schools, convents, and seminaries yawned for Magnolia.

Perhaps Parthy was right. “What kind of a life is this for a child!” she demanded. And later, “A fine kind of a way for a young lady to be living—slopping up and down these rivers, seeing nothing but loafers and gamblers and niggers and worse. What about her
Future?” Future, as she pronounced it, was spelled with a capital F and was a thin disguise for the word husband.

“Future’ll take care of itself,” Andy assured her, blithely.

“If that isn’t just like a man!”

It was inevitable that Magnolia should, sooner or later, find herself through force of circumstance treading the boards as an actress in the Cotton Blossom Floating Theatre company. Not only that, she found herself playing ingénue leads. She had been thrown in as a stop-gap following Elly’s defection, and had become quite without previous planning, a permanent member of the troupe. Strangely enough, she developed an enormous following, though she lacked that saccharine quality which river towns had come to expect in their show-boat ingénues. True, her long legs were a little lanky beneath the short skirts of the woodman’s pure daughter, but what she lacked in one extremity she made up in another. They got full measure when they looked at her eyes, and her voice made the small-town housewives weep. Yet when their husbands nudged them, saying, “What you sniffling about?” they could only reply, “I don’t know.” And no more did they.

Elly was twenty-eight when she deserted Schultzy for a gambler from Mobile. For three years she had been restless, fault-finding, dissatisfied. Each autumn she would announce to Captain Andy her intention to forsake the rivers and bestow her talents ashore. During the winter she would try to get an engagement through the Chicago booking offices contrary to the
custom of show-boat actors whose habit it was to hibernate in the winter on the savings of a long and economical summer. But the Chicago field was sparse and uncertain. She never had the courage or the imagination to go as far as New York. April would find her back on the
Cotton Blossom
. Between her and Schultzy the bickerings and the quarrels became more and more frequent. She openly defied Schultzy as he directed rehearsals. She refused to follow his suggestions though he had a real sense of direction. Everything she knew he had taught her. She invariably misread a line and had to be coached in it, word by word; inflection; business; everything.

Yet now, when Schultzy said, “No! Listen. You been kidnapped and smuggled on board this rich fella’s yacht, see. And he thinks he’s got you in his power. He goes to grab you. You’re here, see. Then you point toward the door back of him, see, like you saw something there scared the life out of you. He turns around and you grab the gun off the table, see, and cover him, and there’s your big speech.
So
and so and
so
and so and
so
and so and
so
and so——” the
ad lib
. directions that have held since the day of Shakespeare.

Elly would deliberately defy him. Others in the company—new members—began to take their cue from her.

She complained about her wardrobe; refused to interest herself in it, though she had been an indefatigable needlewoman. Now, instead of sewing, you saw her looking moodily out across the river, her hands idle, her brows black. An unintelligent and unresourceful
woman turned moody and thoughtful must come to mischief, for within herself she finds no solace.

At Mobile, then, she was gone. It was, they all knew, the black-moustached gambler who had been following the show boat down the river since they played Paducah, Kentucky. Elly had had dozens of admirers in her show-boat career; had received much attention from Southern gallants, gamblers, loafers, adventurers—all the romantic beaux of the river towns of the ’80s. Her attitude toward them had been puritanical to the point of sniffiness, though she had enjoyed their homage and always displayed any amorous missives or gifts that came her way.