Show Boat (21 page)

“Magnolia!” shouted Andy in a French frenzy, clutching the whiskers as though to raise himself by them from the floor.

Magnolia must have been enjoying the situation. Here were two men, both of whom adored her, and she them. She therefore set about testing their love. Her expression became tragic—but not so tragic as to mar her delightful appearance. To the one who loved her most deeply and unselfishly she said:

“You don’t care anything about me or my happiness. It’s all this old boat, and business, and money. Haven’t I worked, night after night, year in, year out! And now, when I have a chance to enjoy myself—it isn’t as if you hadn’t promised me——”

“We’re going, I tell you, Nollie. But your ma isn’t even here. And how did I know Doc was going to be stuck at Baton Rouge! We got plenty of time to have dinner ashore and go to the theatre, but we’ll have to give up the drive to Pontchartrain——”

A heartbroken wail from Magnolia. Her great dark eyes turned in appeal to Ravenal. “It’s the drive I like better than anything in the world. And horses. I’m crazy about horses, and I don’t get a chance to drive
—oh, well—” at an objection from Andy—“sometimes; but what kind of horses do they have in those little towns! And here you can get a splendid pair, all shiny, and their nostrils working, and a victoria and lovely long tails and a clanky harness and fawn cushions and the lake and soft-shell crabs——” She was becoming incoherent, but remained as lovely as ever, and grew more appealing by the moment.

Ravenal resisted a mad urge to take her in his arms. He addressed himself earnestly to the agonized Andy. “If you will trust me, Captain Hawks, I have a plan which I have just thought of. I know New Orleans very well and I am—uh—very well known in New Orleans. Miss Magnolia has set her heart on this little holiday. I know where I can get a splendid turnout. Chestnuts—very high steppers, but quite safe.” An unadult squeal of delight from Magnolia. “If we start immediately, we can enjoy quite a drive—Miss Magnolia and I. If you like, we can take Mrs. Means with us, or Mrs. Soaper——”

“No,” from the brazen beauty.

“—and return in time to meet you and Mrs. Hawks at, say, Antoine’s for dinner.”

“Oh, Papa!” cried Magnolia now. “Oh, Papa!”

“Your ma——” began Andy again, feebly. The stacks and piles still lay uncounted on the desk. This thing must be settled somehow. He scuttled to the window, scanned the wharf, the streets that led up from it. “I don’t know where she’s got to.” He turned from the window to survey the pair, helplessly. Something about them—the very fitness of their standing
there together, so young, so beautiful, so eager, so alive, so vibrant—melted the romantic heart within him. Magnolia in her holiday garb; Ravenal in his tailored perfection. “Oh, well, I don’t see how it’ll hurt any. Your ma and I will meet you at Antoine’s at, say, half-past six——”

They were off. It was as if they had been lifted bodily and blown together out of the little office, across the gangplank to the landing. Flat Foot stared after them almost benignly.

Andy returned to his desk. Resumed his contented crooning. Four o’clock struck. Half-past four. His pencil beat a rat-a-tat-tat as he jotted down the splendid figures. A gold mine, this Ravenal. A fine figger of a boy. Cheap at thirty. Rat-a-tat-tat. And fifty’s one thousand. And twenty-five’s one thousand twenty-five. And fifty’s—and fifty’s—twelve twenty-five—gosh a’mighty!——

A shriek. A bouncing across the gangplank and into the cubby hole just as Andy was rounding, happily, into thirteen hundred. A hand clutching his shoulder frantically, whirling him bodily out of the creaking swivel chair. Parthy, hat awry, bosom palpitating, eyes starting, mouth working.

“On Canal Street!” she wheezed. It was as though the shriek she had intended were choked in her throat by the very force of the feeling behind it, so that it emerged a strangled thing. “Canal Street! The two of them … with my own eyes … driving … in a … in a——”

She sank into a chair. There seemed to be no
pretense about this. Andy, for once, was alarmed. The tall shambling figure of Frank, the heavy, passed the little ticket window, blocked the low doorway. He stared, open-mouthed, at the almost recumbent Parthy. He was breathing heavily and looked aggrieved.

“She ran away from me,” he said. “Sees ’em in the crowd, driving, and tries to run after the carriage on Canal, with everybody thinking she’s gone loony. Then she runs down here to the landing, me after her. Woman her age. What d’yah take me for, anyway!”

But Parthy did not hear him. He did not exist. Her face was ashen. “He’s a murderer!” she now gasped.

Andy’s patience, never too long-suffering, snapped under the strain of the afternoon’s happenings. “What’s wrong with you, woman! Have you gone clean crazy! Who’s a murderer! Frank? Who’s he murdered? For two cents I’d murder the both of you, come howling in here when a man’s trying to run his business
like
a business and not like a yowling insane asylum——”

Parthy stood up, shaking. Her voice was high and quavering. “Listen to me, you fool. I talked to the man on the docks—the one he was talking to—and he wouldn’t tell me anything and he said I could ask the chief of police if I wanted to know about anybody, and I went to the chief of police, and a perfect gentleman if there ever was one, and he’s killed a man.”

“The chief of police! Killed a man! What man!”

“No!” shrieked Parthy. “Ravenal! Ravenal’s killed a man.”

“God A’mighty, when!” He started as though to rescue Magnolia.

“A year ago. A year ago, in this very town.”

The shock of relief was too much for Andy. He was furious. “They didn’t hang him for it, did they?”

“Hang who?” asked Parthy, feebly.

“Who! Ravenal! They didn’t hang him?”

“Why, no, they let him go. He said he shot him in self——”

“He killed a man and they let him go. What does that prove? He’d a right to. All right. What of it!”

“What of it! Your own daughter is out driving in an open carriage this minute with a murderer, that’s what, Andy Hawks. I saw them with my own eyes. There I was, out trying to protect her from contamination by finding out … and I saw her the minute my back was turned … your doings … your own daughter driving in the open streets in an open carriage with a murderer——”

“Oh, open murderer be damned!” squeaked Andy in his falsetto of utter rage. “I killed a man when I was nineteen, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am, and I’ve been twenty-five years and more as respected a man as there is on the rivers, and that’s the truth if you want to talk about mur——”

But Parthenia Ann Hawks, for the first time in her vigorous life, had fainted.

G
AYLORD RAVENAL had not meant to fall in love. Certainly he had not dreamed of marrying. He was not, he would have told you, a marrying man. Yet Natchez had come and gone, and here he was, still playing juvenile leads on the
Cotton Blossom
; still planning, days ahead, for an opportunity to outwit Mrs. Hawks and see Magnolia alone. He was thoroughly and devastatingly in love. Alternately he pranced and cringed. To-day he would leave this dingy scow. What was he, Gaylord Ravenal, doing aboard a show boat, play-acting for a miserable thirty dollars a week! He who had won (and lost) a thousand a night at poker or faro. To-morrow he was resolved to give up gambling for ever; to make himself worthy of this lovely creature; to make himself indispensable to Andy; to find the weak chink in Parthy’s armour.

He had met all sorts of women in his twenty-four years. He had loved some of them, and many of them had loved him. He had never met a woman like Magnolia. She was a paradoxical product of the life she had led. The contact with the curious and unconventional characters that made up the
Cotton Blossom
troupe; the sights and sounds of river life, sordid, romantic, homely, Rabelaisian, tragic, humorous; the tolerant and meaty wisdom imbibed from her sprightly little father; the
spirit
of laissez faire
that pervaded the whole atmosphere about her, had given her a flavour, a mellowness, a camaraderie found usually only in women twice her age and a hundredfold more experienced. Weaving in and out of this was an engaging primness directly traceable to Parthy. She had, too, a certain dignity that was, perhaps, the result of years of being deferred to as the daughter of a river captain. Sometimes she looked at Ravenal with the wide-eyed gaze of a child. At such times he wished that he might leap into the Mississippi (though muddy) and wash himself clean of his sins as did the pilgrims in the River Jordan.

On that day following Parthy’s excursion ashore at New Orleans there had been between her and Captain Andy a struggle, brief and bitter, from which Andy had emerged battered but victorious.

“That murdering gambler goes or I go,” Parthy had announced, rashly. It was one of those pronunciamentos that can only bring embarrassment to one who utters it.

“He stays.” Andy was iron for once.

He stayed. So did Parthy, of course.

You saw the two—Parthy and Ravenal—eyeing each other, backs to the wall, waiting for a chance to lunge and thrust.

Cotton Blossom
business was booming. News of the show boat’s ingénue and juvenile lead filtered up and down the rivers. During the more romantic scenes of this or that play Parthy invariably stationed herself in the wings and glowered and made muttering sounds to which the two on stage—Magnolia starry-eyed as the
heroine, Ravenal ardent and passionate as the lover—were oblivious. It was their only opportunity to express to each other what they actually felt. It probably was, too, the most public and convincing love-making that ever graced the stage of this or any other theatre.

Ravenal made himself useful in many ways. He took in hand, for example, the
Cotton Blossom
’s battered scenery. It was customary on all show boats to use both sides of a set. One canvas side would represent, perhaps, a drawing room. Its reverse would show the greens and browns of leaves and tree trunks in a forest scene. Both economy and lack of stage space were responsible for this. Painted by a clumsy and unimaginative hand, each leaf daubed as a leaf, each inch of wainscoting drawn to scale, the effect of any
Cotton Blossom
set, when viewed from the other side of the footlights, was unconvincing even to rural and inexperienced eyes. Ravenal set to work with paint and brush and evolved two sets of double scenery which brought forth shrieks of ridicule and protest from the company grouped about the stage.

“It isn’t supposed to look like a forest,” Ravenal explained, slapping on the green paint with a lavish hand. “It’s supposed to give the effect of a forest. The audience isn’t going to sit on the stage, is it? Well, then! Here—this is to be a gate. Well, there’s no use trying to paint a flat thing with slats that nobody will ever believe looks like a gate. I’ll just do this … and this …”

“It does!” cried Magnolia from the middle of the house where she had stationed herself, head held critically on one side. “It does make you think there’s a gate there, without its actually being … Look, Papa!… And the trees. All those lumpy green spots we used to have somehow never looked like leaves.”

All unconsciously Ravenal was using in that day, and in that crude milieu, a method which was to make a certain Bobby Jones famous in the New York theatre of a quarter of a century later.

“Where did you learn to——” some one of the troupe would marvel; Magnolia, perhaps, or Mis’ Means, or Ralph.

“Paris,” Ravenal would reply, briefly. Yet he had never spoken of Paris.

He often referred thus casually to a mysterious past.

“Paris fiddlesticks!” rapped out Parthy, promptly. “No more Paris than he’s a Ravenal of Tennessee, or whatever rascally highfalutin story he’s made up for himself.”

Whereupon, when they were playing Tennessee, weeks later, he strolled one day with Magnolia and Andy into the old vine-covered church of the village, its churchyard fragrant and mysterious with magnolia and ilex; its doorstep worn, its pillars sagging. And there, in a glass case, together with a tattered leather-bound Bible a century and a half old, you saw a time-yellowed document. The black of the ink strokes had, perhaps, taken on a tinge of gray, but the handwriting, clear and legible, met the eye.

I, Jean Baptista Ravenal, of this Province, being through the mercy of Almighty God of sound mind and memory do make, appoint, declare and ordain this and this only to be my last Will and Testament. It is my will that my sons have their estates delivered to them as they severally arrive at the age of twenty and one years, the eldest being Samuel, the second Jean, the third Gaylord.

I will that my slaves be kept to work on my lands that my estate be managed to the best advantage so as my sons may have as liberal an education as the profits thereof will afford. Let them be taught to read and write and be introduced into the practical part of Arithmetic, not too hastily hurrying them to Latin and Grammar. To my sons, when they arrive at age I recommend the pursuit and study of some profession or business (I would wish one to ye Law, the other to Merchandise).

“The other?” cried Magnolia softly then, looking up very bright-eyed and flushed from the case over which she had been bending. “But the third? Gaylord? It doesn’t say——”

“The black sheep. My great-grandfather. There always was a Gaylord. And he always was the black sheep. My grandfather, Gaylord Ravenal and my father Gaylord Ravenal, and——” he bowed.

“Black too, are you?” said Andy then, drily.

“As pitch.”

Magnolia bent again to the book, her brow thoughtful, her lips forming the words and uttering them softly as she deciphered the quaint script.