“The river is up,The channel is deep,The wind blows steady and strong.Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,So row your boat along.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-o.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-O!”
“The river is up,The channel is deep,The wind blows steady and strong.Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,So row your boat along.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-o.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-O!”
“The river is up,The channel is deep,The wind blows steady and strong.Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,So row your boat along.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-o.Down the river,Down the river,Down the O-hi-O!”
“The river is up,
The channel is deep,
The wind blows steady and strong.
Oh, Dinah’s got the hoe cake on,
So row your boat along.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-hi-o.
Down the river,
Down the river,
Down the O-
hi-
O!”
Three tremendous pulls accompanied those last three long-drawn syllables. Magnolia found it most invigorating. Doc had told her, too, that the Ohio had got its name from the time when the Indians, standing on one shore and wishing to cross to the other, would cup their hands and send out the call to the opposite bank, loud and high and clear, “O-HE-O!”
“Do you think it’s true?” Magnolia would say; for Mrs. Hawks had got into the way of calling Doc’s stories stuff-and-nonsense. All those tales, it would seem, to which Magnolia most thrilled, turned out, according to Parthy, to be stuff-and-nonsense. So then, “Do you think it’s true?” she would demand, fearfully.
“Think it! Why, pshaw! I know it’s true. Sure as shootin’.”
It was noteworthy and characteristic of Magnolia that she liked best the rampant rivers. The Illinois, which had possessed such fascination for Tonti, for Joliet, for Marquette—for countlesscoureurs du boiswho had frequented this trail to the southwest—left her cold. Its clear water, its gentle current, its fretless channel, its green hillsides, its tidy bordering grain fields, bored her. From Doc and from her father she learned a haphazard and picturesque chronicle of its history, and that of like rivers—a tale of voyageurs and trappers, of flatboat and keelboat men, of rafters in the great logging days, of shanty boaters, water gipsies, steamboats. She listened, and remembered, but was unmoved. When theCotton Blossomfloated down the tranquil bosom of the Illinois Magnolia read a book. She drank its limpid waters and missed the mud-tang to be found in a draught of the Mississippi.
“If I was going to be a river,” she announced, “I wouldn’t want to be the Illinois, or like those. I’d want to be the Mississippi.”
“How’s that?” asked Captain Andy.
“Because the Illinois, it’s always the same. But the Mississippi is always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”
Doc was oftenest her cicerone and playmate ashore. His knowledge of the countryside, the rivers, the dwellers along the shore and in the back-country, was almost godlike in its omniscience. At his tongue’s end were tales of buccaneers, of pirates, of adventurers. He told her of the bloodthirsty and rapacious Murrel who, not content with robbing and killing his victims, ripped them open, disembowelled them, and threw them into the river.
“Oh, my!” Magnolia would exclaim, inadequately; and peer with some distaste into the water rushing past the boat’s flat sides. “How did he look? Like Steve when he plays Legree?”
“Not by a jugful, he didn’t. Dressed up like a parson, and used to travel from town to town, giving sermons. He had a slick tongue, and while the congregation inside was all stirred up getting their souls saved, Murrel’s gang outside would steal their horses.”
Stories of slaves stolen, sold, restolen, resold, and murdered. Murrel’s attempted capture of New Orleans by rousing the blacks to insurrection against the whites. Tales of Crenshaw, the vulture; of Mason, terror of the Natchez road. On excursions ashore, Doc showed her pirates’ caves, abandoned graveyards, ancient robber retreats along the river banks or in the woods. They visited Sam Grity’s soap kettle, a great iron pot half hidden in a rocky unused field, in which Grity used to cache his stolen plunder. She never again saw an old soap kettle sitting plumply in some Southern kitchen doorway, its sides covered with a handsome black velvet coat of soot, that she did not shiver deliciously. Strong fare for a child at an age when other little girls were reading the Dotty Dimple Series and Little Prudy books.
Doc enjoyed these sanguinary chronicles in the telling as much as Magnolia in the listening. His lined and leathery face would take on the changing expressions suitable to the tenor of the tale. Cunning, cruelty, greed, chased each other across his mobile countenance. Doc had been a show-boat actor himself at some time back in his kaleidoscopic career. So together he and Magnolia and his ancient barrel-bellied black-and-white terrier Catchem roamed the woods and towns and hills and fields and churchyards from Cairo to the Gulf.
Sometimes, in the spring, she went with Julie, the indolent. Elly almost never walked and often did not leave theCotton Blossomfor days together. Elly was extremely neat and fastidious about her person. She was for ever heating kettles and pans of water for bathing, for washing stockings and handkerchiefs. She had a knack with the needle and could devise a quite plausible third-act ball gown out of a length of satin, some limp tulle, and a yard or two of tinsel. She never read. Her industry irked Julie as Julie’s indolence irritated her.
Elly was something of a shrew (Schultzy had learned to his sorrow that your blue-eyed blondes are not always doves). “Pity’s sake, Julie, how you can sit there doing nothing, staring out at that everlasting river’s more than I can see. I should think you’d go plumb crazy.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Do! Mend the hole in your stocking, for one thing.”
“I should say as much,” Mrs. Hawks would agree, if she chanced to be present. She had no love for Elly; but her own passion for industry and order could not but cause her to approve a like trait in another.
Julie would glance down disinterestedly at her long slim foot in its shabby shoe. “Is there a hole in my stocking?”
“You know perfectly well there is, Julie Dozier. You must have seen it the size of a half dollar when you put it on this morning. It was there yesterday, same’s to-day.”
Julie smiled charmingly. “I know. I declare to goodness I hoped it wouldn’t be. When I woke up this morning I thought maybe the good fairies would have darned it up neat’s a pin while I slept.” Julie’s voice was as indolent as Julie herself. She spoke with a Southern drawl. Her I was Ah. Ah declah to goodness—or approximately that.
Magnolia would smile in appreciation of Julie’s gentle raillery. She adored Julie. She thought Elly, with her fair skin and china-blue eyes, as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale, as was natural in a child of her sallow colouring and straight black hair. But the two were antipathetic. Elly, in ill-tempered moments, had been known to speak of Magnolia as “that brat,” though her vanity was fed by the child’s admiration of her beauty. But she never allowed her to dress up in her discarded stage finery, as Julie often did. Elly openly considered herself a gifted actress whose talent and beauty were, thanks to her shiftless husband, pearls cast before the river-town swinery. Pretty though she was, she found small favour in the eyes of men of the company and crew. Strangely enough, it was Julie who drew them, quite without intent on her part. There was something about her life-scarred face, her mournful eyes, her languor, her effortlessness, her very carelessness of dress that seemed to fascinate and hold them. Steve’s jealousy of her was notorious. It was common boat talk, too, that Pete, the engineer of theMollie Able, who played the bull drum in the band, was openly enamoured of her and had tried to steal her from Steve. He followed Julie into town if she so much as stepped ashore. He was found lurking in corners of theCotton Blossomdecks; loitering about the stage where he had no business to be. He even sent her presents of imitation jewellery and gaudy handkerchiefs and work boxes, which she promptly presented to Queenie, first urging that mass of ebon royalty to bedeck herself with her new gifts when dishing up the dinner. In that close community the news of the disposal of these favours soon reached Pete’s sooty ears. There had even been a brawl between Steve and Pete—one of those sudden tempestuous battles, animal-like in its fierceness and brutality. An oath in the darkness; voices low, ominous; the thud of feet; the impact of bone against flesh; deep sob-like breathing; a high weird cry of pain, terror, rage. Pete was overboard and floundering in the swift current of the Mississippi. Powerful swimmer though he was, they had some trouble in fishing him out. It was well that theCotton Blossomand theMollie Ablewere lying at anchor. Bruised and dripping, Pete had repaired to the engine room to dry, and to nurse his wounds, swearing in terms ridiculously like those frequently heard in the second act of aCotton Blossomplay that he would get his revenge on the two of them. He had never, since then, openly molested Julie, but his threats, mutterings, and innuendoes continued. Steve had forbidden his wife to leave the show boat unaccompanied. So it was that when spring came round, and the dogwood gleaming white among the black trunks of the pines and firs was like a bride and her shining attendants in a great cathedral, Julie would tie one of her floppy careless hats under her chin and, together with Magnolia, range the forests for wild flowers. They would wander inland until they found trees other than the willows, the live oaks, and the elms that lined the river banks. They would come upon wild honeysuckle, opalescent pink. In autumn they went nutting, returning with sackfuls of hickory and hazel nuts—anything but the black walnut which any show-boat dweller knows will cause a storm if brought aboard. Sometimes they experienced the shock of gay surprise that follows the sudden sight of gentian, a flash of that rarest of flower colours, blue; almost poignant in its beauty. It always made Magnolia catch her breath a little.
Julie’s flounces trailing in the dust, the two would start out sedately enough, though to the accompaniment of a chorus of admonition and criticism.
From Mrs. Hawks: “Now keep your hat pulled down over your eyes so’s you won’t get all sunburned, Magnolia. Black enough as ’tis. Don’t run and get all overheated. Don’t eat any berries or anything you find in the woods, now. . . . Back by four o’clock the latest . . . poison ivy . . . snakes . . . lost . . . gipsies. . . .”
From Elly, trimming her rosy nails in the cool shade of the front deck: “Julie, your placket’s gaping. And tuck your hair in. No, there, on the side.”
So they made their way up the bank, across the little town, and into the woods. Once out of sight of the boat the two turned and looked back. Then, without a word, each would snatch her hat from her head; and they would look at each other, and Julie would smile her wide slow smile, and Magnolia’s dark plain pointed little face would flash into sudden beauty. From some part of her person where it doubtless was needed Julie would extract a pin and with it fasten up the tail of her skirt. Having thus hoisted the red flag of rebellion, they would plunge into the woods to emerge hot, sticky, bramble-torn, stained, flower-laden, and late. They met Parthy’s upbraidings and Steve’s reproaches with cheerful unconcern.
Often Magnolia went to town with her father, or drove with him or Doc into the back-country. Andy did much of the marketing for the boat’s food, frequently hampered, supplemented, or interfered with by Parthy’s less openhanded methods. He loved good food, considered it important to happiness, liked to order it and talk about it; was himself an excellent cook, like most boatmen, and had been known to spend a pleasant half hour reading the cook book. The butchers, grocers, and general store keepers of the river towns knew Andy, understood his fussy ways, liked him. He bought shrewdly but generously, without haggling; and often presented a store acquaintance of long standing with a pair of tickets for the night’s performance. When he and Magnolia had time to range the countryside in a livery rig, Andy would select the smartest and most glittering buggy and the liveliest nag to be had. Being a poor driver and jerky, with no knowledge of a horse’s nerves and mouth, the ride was likely to be exhilarating to the point of danger. The animal always was returned to the stable in a lather, the vehicle spattered with mud-flecks to the hood. Certainly, it was due to Andy more than Parthy that theCotton Blossomwas reputed the best-fed show boat on the rivers. He was always bringing home in triumph a great juicy ham, a side of beef. He liked to forage the season’s first and best: a bushel of downy peaches, fresh-picked; watermelons; little honey-sweet seckel pears; a dozen plump broilers; new corn; a great yellow cheese ripe for cutting.
He would plump his purchases down on the kitchen table while Queenie surveyed his booty, hands on ample hips. She never resented his suggestions, though Parthy’s offended her. Capering, Andy would poke a forefinger into a pullet’s fat sides. “Rub ’em over with a little garlic, Queenie, to flavour ’em up. Plenty of butter and strips of bacon. Cover ’em over till they’re tender and then give ’em a quick brown the last twenty minutes.”
Queenie, knowing all this, still did not resent his direction. “That shif’less no-’count Jo knew ’bout cookin’ like you do, Cap’n Andy, Ah’d git to rest mah feet now an’ again, Ah sure would.”
Magnolia liked to loiter in the big, low-raftered kitchen. It was a place of pleasant smells and sights and sounds. It was here that she learned Negro spirituals from Jo and cooking from Queenie, both of which accomplishments stood her in good stead in later years. Queenie had, for example, a way of stuffing a ham for baking. It was a fascinating process to behold, and one that took hours. Spices—bay, thyme, onion, clove, mustard, allspice, pepper—chopped and mixed and stirred together. A sharp-pointed knife plunged deep into the juicy ham. The incision stuffed with the spicy mixture. Another plunge with the knife. Another filling. Again and again and again until the great ham had grown to twice its size. Then a heavy clean white cloth, needle and coarse thread. Sewed up tight and plump in its jacket the ham was immersed in a pot of water and boiled. Out when tender, the jacket removed; into the oven with it. Basting and basting from Queenie’s long-handled spoon. The long sharp knife again for cutting, and then the slices, juicy and scented, with the stuffing of spices making a mosaic pattern against the pink of the meat. Many years later Kim Ravenal, the actress, would serve at the famous little Sunday night suppers that she and her husband Kenneth Cameron were so fond of giving a dish that she called hamà laQueenie.
“How does your cook do it!” her friends would say—Ethel Barrymore or Kit Cornell or Frank Crowninshield or Charley Towne or Woollcott. “I’ll bet it isn’t real at all. It’s painted on the platter.”
“It is not! It’s a practical ham, stuffed with all kinds of devilment. The recipe is my mother’s. She got it from an old Southern cook named Queenie.”
“Listen, Kim. You’re among friends. Your dear public is not present. You don’t have to pretend any old Southern aristocracy Virginia belle mammy stuff withus.”
“Pretend, you great oaf! I was born on a show boat on the Mississippi, and proud of it. Everybody knows that.”
Mrs. Hawks, bustling into the show-boat kitchen with her unerring gift for scenting an atmosphere of mellow enjoyment, and dissipating it, would find Magnolia perched on a chair, both elbows on the table, her palms propping her chin as she regarded with round-eyed fascination Queenie’s magic manipulations. Or perhaps Jo, the charming and shiftless, would be singing for her one of the Negro plantation songs, wistful with longing and pain; the folk songs of a wronged race, later to come into a blaze of popularity as spirituals.
For some nautical reason, a broad beam, about six inches high and correspondingly wide, stretched across the kitchen floor from side to side, dividing the room. Through long use Jo and Queenie had become accustomed to stepping over this obstruction, Queenie ponderously, Jo with an effortless swing of his lank legs. On this Magnolia used to sit, her arms hugging her knees, her great eyes in the little sallow pointed face fixed attentively on Jo. The kitchen was very clean and shining and stuffy. Jo’s legs were crossed, one foot in its great low shapeless shoe hooked in the chair rung, his banjo cradled in his lap. The once white parchment face of the instrument was now almost as black as Jo’s, what with much strumming by work-stained fingers.
“Which one, Miss Magnolia?”
“I Got Shoes,” Magnolia would answer, promptly.
Jo would throw back his head, his sombre eyes half shut:
[Lyrics]I got a shoes, you got a shoes.All of God’s chil-dren got a shoes;When I get to Heav-en goin’ to put on my shoes.Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heav’n.Heav’n, Heav’n,Ev-’ry bod-y talk-in’ ’bout heav’n ain’t go-in’ there;Heav’n, Heav’n,Goin’ to shout all over God’s Heav’n.
[Lyrics]I got a shoes, you got a shoes.All of God’s chil-dren got a shoes;When I get to Heav-en goin’ to put on my shoes.Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heav’n.Heav’n, Heav’n,Ev-’ry bod-y talk-in’ ’bout heav’n ain’t go-in’ there;Heav’n, Heav’n,Goin’ to shout all over God’s Heav’n.
[Lyrics]I got a shoes, you got a shoes.All of God’s chil-dren got a shoes;When I get to Heav-en goin’ to put on my shoes.Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heav’n.
[Lyrics]I got a shoes, you got a shoes.All of God’s chil-dren got a shoes;When I get to Heav-en goin’ to put on my shoes.Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heav’n.
[Lyrics]
I got a shoes, you got a shoes.
All of God’s chil-dren got a shoes;
When I get to Heav-en goin’ to put on my shoes.
Goin’ to walk all over God’s Heav’n.
Heav’n, Heav’n,Ev-’ry bod-y talk-in’ ’bout heav’n ain’t go-in’ there;Heav’n, Heav’n,Goin’ to shout all over God’s Heav’n.
Heav’n, Heav’n,
Ev-’ry bod-y talk-in’ ’bout heav’n ain’t go-in’ there;
Heav’n, Heav’n,
Goin’ to shout all over God’s Heav’n.
The longing of a footsore, ragged, driven race expressed in the tragically childlike terms of shoes, white robes, wings, and the wise and simple insight into hypocrisy: “Ev’rybody talkin ’bout Heav’n ain’t goin’ there. . . .”
“Now which one?” His fingers still picking the strings, ready at a word to slip into the opening chords of the next song.
“Go Down, Moses.”
She liked this one—at once the most majestic and supplicating of all the Negro folk songs—because it always made her cry a little. Sometimes Queenie, busy at the stove or the kitchen table, joined in with her high rich camp-meeting voice. Jo’s voice was a reedy tenor, but soft and husky with the indescribable Negro vocal quality. Magnolia soon knew the tune and the words of every song in Jo’s repertoire. Unconsciously, being an excellent mimic, she sang as Jo and Queenie sang, her head thrown slightly back, her eyes rolling or half closed, one foot beating rhythmic time to the music’s cadence. Her voice was true, though mediocre; but she got into this the hoarsely sweet Negro overtone—purple velvet muffling a flute.
Between Jo and Queenie flourished a fighting affection, deep, true, and lasting. There was some doubt as to the actual legal existence of their marriage, but the union was sound and normal enough. At each season’s close they left the show boat the richer by three hundred dollars, clean new calico for Queenie, and proper jeans for Jo. Shoes on their feet. Hats on their heads. Bundles in their arms. Each spring they returned penniless, in rags, and slightly liquored. They had had a magnificent time. They did not drink again while theCotton Blossomkitchen was their home. But the next winter the programme repeated itself. Captain Andy liked and trusted them. They were as faithful to him as their childlike vagaries would permit.
So, filled with the healthy ecstasy of song, the Negro man and woman and the white child would sit in deep contentment in the show-boat kitchen. The sound of a door slammed. Quick heavy footsteps. Three sets of nerves went taut. Parthy.
“Maggie Hawks, have you practised to-day?”
“Some.”
“How much?”
“Oh, half an hour—more.”
“When?”
“ ’Smorning.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
The sulky lower lip out. The high forehead wrinkled by a frown. Song flown. Peace gone.
“I did so. Jo, didn’t you hear me practising?”
“Ah suah did, Miss Magnolia.”
“You march right out of here, young lady, and practise another half hour. Do you think your father’s made of money, that I can throw fifty-cent pieces away on George for nothing? Now you do your exercises fifteen minutes and the Maiden’s Prayer fifteen. . . . Idea!”
Magnolia marched. Out of earshot Parthy expressed her opinion of nigger songs. “I declare I don’t know where you get your low ways from! White people aren’t good enough for you, I suppose, that you’ve got to run with blacks in the kitchen. Now you sit yourself down on that stool.”
Magnolia was actually having music lessons. George, the Whistler and piano player, was her teacher, receiving fifty cents an hour for weekly instruction. Driven by her stern parent, she practised an hour daily on the tinny old piano in the orchestra pit, a rebellious, skinny, pathetic little figure strumming painstakingly away in the great emptiness of the show-boat auditorium. She must needs choose her time for practice when a rehearsal of the night’s play was not in progress on the stage or when the band was not struggling with the music of a new song and dance number. Incredibly enough, she actually learned something of the mechanics of music, if not of its technique. She had an excellent rhythm sense, and this was aided by none other than Jo, whose feeling for time and beat and measure and pitch was flawless. Queenie lumped his song gift in with his general shiftlessness. Born fifty years later he might have known brief fame in some midnight revue or Club Alabam’ on Broadway. Certainly Magnolia unwittingly learned more of real music from black Jo and many another Negro wharf minstrel than she did from hours of the heavy-handed and unlyrical George.
That Mrs. Hawks could introduce into the indolent tenor of show-boat life anything so methodical and humdrum as five-finger exercises done an hour daily was triumphant proof of her indomitable driving force. Life had miscast her in the rôle of wife and mother. She was born to be a Madam Chairman. Committees, Votes, Movements, Drives, Platforms, Gavels, Reports all showed in her stars. Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as theCotton Blossomafforded. Parthy had never heard the word Feminist, and wouldn’t have recognized it if she had. One spoke at that time not of Women’s Rights but of Women’s Wrongs. On these Parthenia often waxed tartly eloquent. Her housekeeping fervour was the natural result of her lack of a more impersonal safety valve. TheCotton Blossomshone like a Methodist Sunday household. Only Julie and Windy, theMollie Ablepilot, defied her. She actually indulged in those most domestic of rites, canning and preserving, on board the boat. Donning an all-enveloping gingham apron, she would set frenziedly to work on two bushels of peaches or seckel pears; baskets of tomatoes; pecks of apples. Pickled pears, peach marmalade, grape jell in jars and pots and glasses filled shelves and cupboards. Queenie found a great deal of satisfaction in the fact that occasionally, owing to some culinary accident or to the unusual motion of the flat-bottomedCotton Blossomin the rough waters of an open bay, one of these jars was found smashed on the floor, its rich purple or amber contents mingling with splinters of glass. No one—not even Parthy—ever dared connect Queenie with these quite explicable mishaps.
Parthy was an expert needlewoman. She often assisted Julie or Elly or Mis’ Means with their costumes. To see her stern implacable face bent over a heap of frivolous stuffs while her industrious fingers swiftly sent the needle flashing through unvarying seams was to receive the shock that comes of beholding the incongruous. The enormity of it penetrated even her blunt sensibilities.
“If anybody’d ever told me that I’d live to see the day when I’d be sewing on costumes for show folks!”
“Run along, Parthy. You like it,” Andy would say.
But she never would admit that. “Like it or lump it, what can I do! Married you for better or worse, didn’t I!” Her tone leaving no doubt as to the path down which that act had led her. Actually she was having a rich, care-free, and varied life such as she had never dreamed of and of which she secretly was enamoured.
Dwellers in this or that river town loitering down at the landing to see what manner of sin and loose-living went on in and about this show boat with its painted women and play-acting men would be startled to hear sounds and sniff smells which were identical with those which might be issuing that very moment from their own smug and godly dwellings ashore. From out the open doors of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre came the unmistakable and humdrum sounds of scales and five-finger exercises done painfully and unwillingly by rebellious childish hands. Ta-ta-ta—TA—ta-ta-ta. From below decks there floated up the mouth-watering savour of tomato ketchup, of boiling vinegar and spices, or the perfumed aroma of luscious fruits seething in sugary kettles.
“Smells for all the world like somebody was doing up sweet pickles.” One village matron to another.
“Well, I suppose they got to eat like other folks.”
Ta-ta-ta—TA—ta-ta-ta.
It was inevitable, however, that the ease and indolence of the life, as well as the daily contact with odd and unconventional characters must leave some imprint on even so adamantine an exterior as Parthy’s. Little by little her school-teacherly diction dropped from her. Slowly her vowels began to slur, her aren’ts became ain’ts, her crisp new England utterance took on something of the slovenly Southern drawl, her consonants were missing from the end of a word here and there. True, she still bustled and nagged, managed and scolded, drove and reproached. She still had the power to make Andy jump with nervousness. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the influence of this virago was more definitely felt than that of any other one of theCotton Blossom’scompany and crew. Of these only Julie Dozier, and Windy, the pilot (so called because he almost never talked) actually triumphed over Mrs. Hawks. Julie’s was a negative victory. She never voluntarily spoke to Parthy and had the power to aggravate that lady to the point of frenzy by remaining limp, supine, and idle when Parthy thought she should be most active; by raising her right eyebrow quizzically in response to a more than usually energetic tirade; by the habitual disorder of the tiny room which she shared with Steve; by the flagrant carelessness and untidiness of her own gaunt graceful person.
“I declare, Hawks, what you keep that slatternly yellow cat around this boat for beats me.”
“Best actress in the whole caboodle, that’s why.” Something fine in little Captain Andy had seen and recognized the flame that might have glorified Julie had it not instead consumed her. “That girl had the right backing she’d make her mark, and not in any show boat, either. I’ve been to New York. I’ve seen ’em down at Wallack’s and Daly’s and around.”
“A slut, that’s what she is. I had my way she’d leave this boat bag and baggage.”
“Well, this is one time you won’t have your way, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am.” She had not yet killed the spirit in Andy.
“Mark my words, you’ll live to regret it. The way she looks out of those black eyes of hers! Gives me the creeps.”
“What would you have the girl look out of,” retorted Andy, not very brilliantly. “Her ears?”
Julie could not but know of this antagonism toward her. Some perverse streak in her otherwise rich and gentle make-up caused her to find a sinister pleasure in arousing it.
Windy’s victory was more definitely dramatic, though his defensive method against Parthy’s attacks resembled in sardonic quiet and poise Julie’s own. Windy was accounted one of the most expert pilots on the Mississippi. He knew every coil and sinew and stripe of the yellow serpent. River men used his name as a synonym for magic with the pilot’s wheel. Starless night or misty day; shoal water or deep, it was all one to Windy. Though Andy’s senior by more than fifteen years, the two had been friends for twenty. Captain Andy had enormous respect for his steersmanship; was impressed by his taciturnity (being himself so talkative and vivacious); enjoyed talking with him in the bright quiet security of the pilot house. He was absolute czar of theMollie Ableand theCotton Blossom, as befitted his high accomplishments. No one ever dreamed of opposing him except Parthy. He was slovenly of person, careless of habit. These shortcomings Parthy undertook to correct early in her show-boat career. She met with defeat so prompt, so complete, so crushing as to cause her for ever after to leave him unmolested.
Windy had muddy boots. They were, it seemed, congenitally so. He would go ashore in mid-afternoon of a hot August day when farmers for miles around had been praying for rain these weeks past and return in a downpour with half the muck and clay of the countryside clinging to his number eleven black square-toed elastic-side boots. A tall, emaciated drooping old man, Windy; with long gnarled muscular hands whose enlarged knuckles and leathery palms were the result of almost half a century at the wheel. His pants were always grease-stained; his black string tie and gray shirt spattered with tobacco juice; his brown jersey frayed and ragged. Across his front he wore a fine anchor watch chain, or “log” chain, as it was called. And gleaming behind the long flowing tobacco-splotched gray beard that reached almost to his waist could be glimpsed a milkily pink pearl stud like a star behind a dirty cloud-bank. The jewel had been come by, doubtless, in payment of some waterfront saloon gambling debt. Surely its exquisite curves had once glowed upon fine and perfumed linen.
It was against this taciturn and omnipotent conqueror of the rivers that Parthy raised the flag of battle.
“Traipsin’ up and down this boat and theMollie Able, spitting his filthy tobacco and leaving mud tracks like an elephant that’s been in a bog. If I’ve had those steps leading up to the pilot house scrubbed once, I’ve had ’em scrubbed ten times this week, and now look at them! I won’t have it, and so I tell you. Why can’t he go up the side of the boat the way a pilot is supposed to do! What’s that side ladder for, I’d like to know! He’s supposed to go up it; not the steps.”
“Now, Parthy, you can’t run a boat the way you would a kitchen back in Thebes. Windy’s no hired man. He’s the best pilot on the rivers, and I’m lucky to have him. A hundred jobs better than this ready to jump at him if he so much as crooks a finger. He’s pulled this tub through good many tight places where any other pilot’d landed us high and dry on a sand bar. And don’t you forget it.”
“He’s a dirty old man. And I won’t have it. Muddying up my clean . . .”
Parthy was not one of your scolds who takes her grievances out in mere words. With her, to threaten was to act. That very morning, just before theCotton Blossomwas making a late departure from Greenville, where they had played the night before, to Sunnisie Side Landing, twelve miles below, this formidable woman, armed with hammer and nails, took advantage of Windy’s temporary absence below decks to nail down the hatch above the steps leading to the pilot house. She was the kind of woman who can drive a nail straight. She drove ten of them, long and firm and deep. A pity that no one saw her. It was a sight worth seeing, this accomplished and indomitable virago in curl papers, driving nails with a sure and steady stroke.
Below stairs Windy, coming aboard from an early morning look around, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, sank his great yellow fangs into a generous wedge of Honest Scrap, and prepared to climb the stairs to theCotton Blossompilot house, there to manipulate wheel and cord that would convey his orders to Pete in the engine room.
Up the stairs, leaving a mud spoor behind. One hand raised to lift the hatch; wondering, meanwhile, to find it closed. A mighty heave; a pounding with the great fist; another heave, then, with the powerful old shoulder.
“Nailed,” said Windy aloud to himself, mildly. Then, still mildly, “The old hell-cat.” He spat, then, on the hatchway steps and clumped leisurely down again. He leaned over the boat rail, looking benignly down at the crowd of idlers gathered at the wharf to watch the show boat cast off. Then he crossed the deck again to where a capacious and carpet-seated easy chair held out its inviting arms. Into this he sank with a grunt of relaxation. From his pocket he took the pipe so recently relinquished, filled it, tamped it, lighted it. From another pocket he took a month-old copy of the New OrleansTimes-Democrat, turned to the column marked Shipping News, and settled down, apparently, for a long quiet day with literature.
Up came the anchor. In came the hawser. Chains clanked. The sound of the gangplank drawn up. The hoarse shouts from land and water that always attend the departure of a river boat. “Throw her over there! Lift ’er! Heh, Pete! Gimme hand here! Little to the left. Other side! Hold on! Easy!”
The faces of the crowd ashore turned expectantly toward the boat. Everything shipshape. Pete in the engine room. Captain Andy scampering for the texas. Silence. No bells. No steam. No hoarse shouts of command. God A’mighty, where’s Windy? Windy! Windy!
Windy lowers his shielding newspaper and mildly regards the capering captain and bewildered crew and startled company. He is wearing his silver-rimmed reading spectacles slightly askew on his biblical-looking hooked nose. Andy rushes up to him, all the Basque in him bubbling. “God’s sake, Windy, what’s . . . why don’t you take her! We’re going.”
Windy chewed rhythmically for a moment, spat a long brown jet of juice, wiped his hairy mouth with the back of one gnarled hand. “We ain’t going, Cap’n Hawks, because she can’t go till I give her the go-ahead. And I ain’t give her the go-ahead. I’m the pilot of this here boat.”
“But why? What the . . . Wh——”
“The hatch is nailed down above the steps leading to the pilot house, Cap’n Andy. Till that hatchway’s open, I don’t climb up to no pilot house. And till I climb up to the pilot house, she don’t get no go-ahead. And till I give her the go-ahead, she don’t go, not if we stay here alongside this landing till theCotton Blossomrots.”
He looked around benignly and resumed his reading of the New OrleansTimes-Democrat.
Profanity, frowned upon under Parthy’s régime, now welled up in Andy and burst from him in spangled geysers. Words seethed to the surface and exploded like fireworks. Twenty-five years of river life had equipped him with a vocabulary rich, varied, purple. He neglected neither the heavens above nor the earth beneath. Revolt and rage shook his wiry little frame. Years of henpecking, years of natural gaiety suppressed, years of mincing when he wished to stride, years of silence when he wished to sing, now were wiped away by the stream of undiluted rage that burst from Captain Andy Hawks. It was a torrent, a flood, a Mississippi of profanity in which hells and damns were mere drops in the mighty roaring mass.
“Out with your crowbars there. Pry up that hatch! I’m captain of this boat, by God, and anybody, man or woman, who nails down that hatch again without my orders gets put off this boat wherever we are, and so I say.”
Did Parthenia Ann Hawks shrink and cower and pale under the blinding glare of this pyrotechnic profanity? Not that indomitable woman. The picture of outraged virtue in curl papers, she stood her ground like a Roman matron. She had even, when the flood broke, sent Magnolia indoors with a gesture meant to convey protection from the pollution of this verbal stream.
“Well, Captain Hawks, a fine example you have set for your company and crew I must say.”
“Youmust say! You——! Let me tell you, Mrs. Hawks, ma’am, the less you say the better. And I repeat, anybody touches that hatchway again——”
“Touch it!” echoed Parthy in icy disdain. “I wouldn’t touch it, nor the pilot house, nor the pilot either, if you’ll excuse my saying so, with a ten-foot pole.”
And swept away with as much dignity as aCotton Blossomearly morning costume would permit. Her head bloody but unbowed.
VII
Juliewas gone. Steve was gone. Tragedy had stalked into Magnolia’s life; had cast its sable mantle over theCotton Blossom. Pete had kept his promise and revenge had been his. But the taste of triumph had not, after all, been sweet in his mouth. There was little of the peace of satisfaction in his sooty face stuck out of the engine-room door. The arm that beat the ball drum in the band was now a listless member, so that a hollow mournful thump issued from that which should have given forth a rousing boom.
The day theCotton Blossomwas due to play Lemoyne, Mississippi, Julie Dozier took sick. In show-boat troupes, as well as in every other theatrical company in the world, it is an unwritten law that an actor must never be too sick to play. He may be sick. Before the performance he may be too sick to stand; immediately after the performance he may collapse. He may, if necessary, die on the stage and the curtain will then be lowered. But no real trouper while conscious will ever confess himself too sick to go on when the overture ends and the lights go down.
Julie knew this. She had played show boats for years, up and down the rivers of the Middle West and the South. She had a large and loyal following. Lemoyne was a good town, situated on the river, prosperous, sizable.
Julie lay on her bed in her darkened room, refusing all offers of aid. She did not want food. She did not want cold compresses on her head. She did not want hot compresses on her head. She wanted to be left alone—with Steve. Together the two stayed in the darkened room, and when some member of the company came to the door with offers of aid or comfort, there came into their faces a look that was strangely like one of fear, followed immediately by a look of relief.
Queenie sent Jo to the door with soup, her panacea for all ailments, whether of the flesh or the spirit. Julie made a show of eating it, but when Jo had clumped across the stage and down to his kitchen Julie motioned to Steve. He threw the contents of the bowl out of the window into the yellow waters of the Mississippi.
Doc appeared at Julie’s door for the tenth time though it was only mid-morning. “Think you can play all right, to-night, though, don’t you, Julie?”
In the semi-darkness of her shaded room Julie’s eyes glowed suddenly wide and luminous. She sat up in bed, pushing her hair back from her forehead with a gesture so wild as to startle the old trouper.
“No!” she cried, in a sort of terror. “No! I can’t play to-night. Don’t ask me.”
Blank astonishment made Doc’s face almost ludicrous. For an actress to announce ten hours before the time set for the curtain’s rising that she would not be able to go on that evening—an actress who had not suffered decapitation or an amputation—was a thing unheard of in Doc’s experience.
“God a’mighty, Julie! If you’re sick as all that, you’d better see a doctor. Steve, what say?”
The great blond giant seated at the side of Julie’s bed did not look round at his questioner. His eyes were on Julie’s face. “Julie’s funny that way. She’s set against doctors. Won’t have one, that’s all. Don’t coax her. It’ll only make her worse.”
Inured as he was to the vagaries of woman, this apparently was too much for Doc. Schultzy appeared in the doorway; peered into the dimness of the little room.
“Funny thing. I guess you must have an admirer in this town, Jule. Somebody’s stole your picture, frame and all, out of the layout in the lobby there. First I thought it might be that crazy Pete, used to be so stuck on you. . . . Now, now, Steve! Keep your shirt on! Keep your shirt on! . . . I asked him, straight, but he was surprised all right. He ain’t good enough actor to fool me. He didn’t do it. Must be some town rube all right, Julie, got stuck on your shape or something. I put up another one.” He stood a moment, thoughtfully. Elly came up behind him, hatted and gloved.
“I’m going up to town, Julie. Can I fetch you something? An orange, maybe? Or something from the drug store?”
Julie’s head on the pillow moved a negative. “She says no, thanks,” Steve answered for her, shortly. It was as though both laboured under a strain. The three in the doorway sensed it. Elly shrugged her shoulders, though whether from pique or indifference it was hard to say. Doc still stood puzzled, bewildered. Schultzy half turned away. “S’long’s you’re all right by to-night,” he said cheerfully.
“Says she won’t be,” Doc put in, lowering his voice.
“Won’t be!” repeated Schultzy, almost shrilly. “Why, she ain’tsick, is she! I mean, sick!”
Schultzy sent his voice shrilling from Julie’s little bedroom doorway across the bare stage, up the aisles of the empty auditorium, so that it penetrated the box office at the far end of the boat, where Andy, at the ticket window, was just about to be relieved by Parthy.
“Heh, Cap! Cap! Come here. Julie’s sick. Julie’s too sick to go on. Says she’s too sick to . . .”
“Here,” said Andy, summarily, to Parthy; and left her in charge of business. Down the aisle with the light quick step that was almost a scamper; up the stage at a bound. “Best advance sale we’ve had since we started out. We never played this town before. License was too high. But here it is, not eleven o’clock, and half the house gone already.” He peered into the darkened room.
From its soft fur nest in the old sealskin muff the marmoset poked its tragic mask and whimpered like a sick baby. This morning there was a strange resemblance between the pinched and pathetic face on the pillow and that of the little sombre-eyed monkey.
By now there was quite a little crowd about Julie’s door. Mis’ Means had joined them and could be heard murmuring about mustard plasters and a good hot something or other. Andy entered the little room with the freedom of an old friend. He looked sharply down at the face on the pillow. The keen eyes plunged deep into the tortured eyes that stared piteously up at him. Something he saw there caused him to reach out with one brown paw, none too immaculate, and pat that other slim brown hand clutching the coverlet so tensely. “Why, Jule, what’s—— Say, s’pose you folks clear out and let me and Jule and Steve here talk things over quiet. Nobody ain’t going to get well with this mob scene you’re putting on. Scat!” Andy could distinguish between mental and physical anguish.
They shifted—Doc, Elly, Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Catchem the torpid. Another moment and they would have moved reluctantly away. But Parthy, torn between her duty at the ticket window and her feminine curiosity as to the cause of the commotion at Julie’s door became, suddenly, all woman. Besides—demon statistician that she was—she suddenly had remembered a curious coincidence in connection with this sudden illness of Julie’s. She slammed down the ticket window, banged the box-office door, sailed down the aisle. As she approached Doc was saying for the dozenth time:
“Person’s too sick to play, they’re sick enough to have a doctor’s what I say. Playing Xenia to-morrow. Good a stand’s we got. Prolly won’t be able to open there, neither, if you’re sick’s all that.”
“I’ll be able to play to-morrow!” cried Julie, in a high strained voice. “I’ll be able to play to-morrow. To-morrow I’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?” demanded Doc.
Steve turned on him in sudden desperation. “She’ll be all right, I tell you. She’ll be all right as soon as she gets out of this town.”
“That’s a funny thing,” exclaimed Parthy. She swept through the little crowd at the door, seeming to mow them down with the energy of her progress. “That’s a funny thing.”
“What?” demanded Steve, his tone belligerent. “What’s funny?”
Captain Andy raised a placating palm. “Now, Parthy, now, Parthy. Sh-sh!”
“Don’t shushme, Hawks. I know what I’m talking about. It came over me just this minute. Julie took sick at this very town of Lemoyne time we came down river last year. Soon as you and Doc decided we wouldn’t open here because the license was too high she got well all of a sudden, just like that!” She snapped a thumb and forefinger.
Silence, thick, uncomfortable, heavy with foreboding, settled down upon the little group in the doorway.
“Nothing so funny about that,” said Captain Andy, stoutly; and threw a sharp glance at the face on the pillow. “This hot sticky climate down here after the cold up north is liable to get anybody to feeling queer. None too chipper myself, far’s that goes. Affects some people that way.” He scratched frenziedly at the mutton-chop whiskers, this side and that.
“Well, I may not knowmuch——” began Parthy.
Down the aisle skimmed Magnolia, shouting as she came, her child’s voice high and sharp with excitement. “Mom! Mom! Look. What do you think! Julie’s picture’s been stolen again right out of the front of the lobby. Julie, they’ve taken your picture again. Somebody took one and Schultzy put another in and now it’s been stolen too.”
She was delighted with her news; radiant with it. Her face fell a little at the sight of the figure on the bed, the serious group about the doorway that received her news with much gravity. She flew to the bed then, all contrition. “Oh, Julie darling, I’m so sorry you’re sick.” Julie turned her face away from the child, toward the wall.
Captain Andy, simulating fury, capered a threatening step toward the doorway crowd now increased by the deprecating figure of Mr. Means and Ralph’s tall shambling bulk. “Will you folks clear out of here or will I have to use force! A body’d think a girl didn’t have the right to feel sick. Doc, you get down and ’tend to that ticket window, or Parthy. If we can’t show to-night we got to leave ’em know. Ralph, you write out a sign and get it pasted up at the post office. . . . Sure you won’t be feeling better by night time, are you, Julie?” He looked doubtfully down at the girl on the bed.
With a sudden lithe movement Julie flung herself into Steve’s arms, clung to him, weeping. “No!” she cried, her voice high, hysterical. “No! No! No! Leave me alone, can’t you! Leave me alone!”
“Sure,” Andy motioned, then, fiercely to the company. “Sure we’ll leave you alone, Julie.”
But Tragedy, having stalked her victim surely, relentlessly, all the morning, now was about to close in upon her. She had sent emissary after emissary down the show-boat aisle, and each had helped to deepen the look of terror in Julie’s eyes. Now sounded the slow shambling heavy tread of Windy the pilot, bearded, sombre, ominous as the figure of fate itself. The little group turned toward him automatically, almost absurdly, like a badly directed mob scene in one of their own improbable plays.
He clumped up the little flight of steps that led from the lower left-hand box to the stage. Clump, clump, clump. Irresistibly Parthy’s eyes peered sharply in pursuit of the muddy tracks that followed each step. She snorted indignantly. Across the stage, his beard waggling up and down as his jaws worked slowly, rhythmically on a wedge of Honest Scrap. As he approached Julie’s doorway he took off his cap and rubbed his pate with his palm, sure sign of great mental perturbation in this monumental old leviathan. The yellow skin of his knobby bald dome-like head shone gold in the rays of the late morning sun that came in through the high windows at the side of the stage.
He stood a moment, chewing, and peering mildly into the dimness of the bedroom, Sphinx-like, it seemed that he never would speak. He stood, champing. TheCotton Blossomtroupe waited. They had not played melodrama for years without being able to sense it when they saw it. He spoke. “Seems that skunk Pete’s up to something.” They waited. The long tobacco-stained beard moved up and down, up and down. “Skinned out half an hour back streaking toward town like possessed. He yanked that picture of Julie out of the hall there. Seen him. I see good deal goes on around here.”
Steve sprang to his feet with a great ripping river oath. “I’ll kill him this time, the ——”
“Seen you take that first picture out, Steve.” The deep red that had darkened Steve’s face and swelled the veins on his great neck receded now, leaving his china-blue eyes staring out of a white and stricken face.
“I never did! I never did!”
Julie sat up, clutching her wrapper at the throat. She laughed shrilly. “What would he want to steal my picture for! His own wife’s picture. Likely!”
“So nobody in this town’d see it, Julie,” said Windy, mildly. “Listen. Fifty years piloting on the rivers you got to have pretty good eyesight. Mine’s as good to-day as it was time I was twenty. I just stepped down from the texas to warn you I see Pete coming along the levee with Ike Keener. Ike’s the sheriff. He’ll be in here now any minute.”
“Let him,” Andy said, stoutly. “Our license is paid. Sheriff’s as welcome around this boat as anybody. Let him.”
But no one heard him; no one heeded him. A strange and terrible thing was happening. Julie had sprung from her bed. In her white nightgown and her wrapper, her long black hair all tumbled and wild about her face, a stricken and hunted thing, she clung to Steve, and he to her. There came a pounding at the door that led into the show-boat auditorium from the fore deck. Steve’s eyes seemed suddenly to sink far back in his head. His cheek-bones showed gaunt and sharp as Julie’s own. His jaw was set so that a livid ridge stood out on either side like bars of white-hot steel. He loosened Julie’s hold almost roughly. From his pocket he whipped a great clasp-knife and opened its flashing blade. Julie did not scream, but the other women did, shriek on shriek. Captain Andy sprang for him, a mouse attacking a mastodon. Steve shook him off with a fling of his powerful shoulders.
“I’m not going to hurt her, you fool. Leave me be. I know what I’m doing.” The pounding came again, louder and more insistent. “Somebody go down and let him in—but keep him there a minute.”
No one stirred. The pounding ceased. The doors opened. The boots of Ike Keener, the sheriff, clattered down the aisle of theCotton Blossom.
“Stop those women screeching,” Steve shouted. Then, to Julie, “It won’t hurt much, darling.” With incredible swiftness he seized Julie’s hand in his left one and ran the keen glittering blade of his knife firmly across the tip of her forefinger. A scarlet line followed it. He bent his blond head, pressed his lips to the wound, sucked it greedily. With a little moan Julie fell back on the bed. Steve snapped the blade into its socket, thrust the knife into his pocket. The boots of Sheriff Ike Keener were clattering across the stage now. The white faces clustered in the doorway—the stricken, bewildered, horrified faces—turned from the two within the room to the one approaching it. They made way for this one silently. Even Parthy was dumb. Magnolia clung to her, wide-eyed, uncomprehending, sensing tragedy though she had never before encountered it.
The lapel of his coat flung back, Ike Keener confronted the little cowed group on the stage. A star shone on his left breast. The scene was like a rehearsal of aCotton Blossomthriller.
“Who’s captain of this here boat?”
Andy, his fingers clutching his whiskers, stepped forward. “I am. What’s wanted with him? Hawks is my name—Captain Andy Hawks, twenty years on the rivers.”
He looked the sheriff of melodrama, did Ike Keener—boots, black moustaches, wide-brimmed black hat, flowing tie, high boots, and all. Steve himself, made up for the part, couldn’t have done it better. “Well, Cap, kind of unpleasant, but I understand there’s a miscegenation case on board.”
“What?” whispered Magnolia. “What’s that? What does he mean, Mom?”
“Hush!” hissed Parthy, and jerked the child’s arm.
“How’s that?” asked Andy, but he knew.
“Miscegenation. Case of a Negro woman married to a white man. Criminal offense in this state, as you well know.”
“No such thing,” shouted Andy. “No such thing on board this boat.”
Sheriff Ike Keener produced a piece of paper. “Name of the white man is Steve Baker. Name of the negress”—he squinted again at the slip of paper—“name of the negress is Julie Dozier.” He looked around at the group. “Which one’s them?”
“Oh, my God!” screamed Elly. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“Shut up,” said Schultzy, roughly.
Steve stepped to the window and threw up the shade, letting the morning light into the crowded disorderly little cubicle. On the bed lay Julie, her eyes enormous in her sallow pinched face.
“I’m Steve Baker. This is my wife.”
Sheriff Ike Keener tucked the paper in his pocket. “You two better dress and come along with me.”
Julie stood up. She looked an old woman. The marmoset whimpered and whined in his fur nest. She put out a hand, automatically, and plucked it from the muff and held it in the warm hollow of her breast. Her great black eyes stared at the sheriff like the wide-open unseeing eyes of a sleep walker.
Steve Baker grinned—rather, his lips drew back from his teeth in a horrid semblance of mirth. He threw a jovial arm about Julie’s shrinking shoulder. For once she had no need to coach him in his part. He looked Ike Keener in the eye. “You wouldn’t call a man a white man that’s got Negro blood in him, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t; not in Mississippi. One drop of nigger blood makes you a nigger in these parts.”
“Well, I got more than a drop of—nigger blood in me, and that’s a fact. You can’t make miscegenation out of that.”
“You ready to swear to that in a court of law?”
“I’ll swear to it any place. I’ll swear it now.” Steve took a step forward, one hand outstretched. “I’ll do more than that. Look at all these folks here. There ain’t one of them but can swear I got Negro blood in me this minute. That’s how white I am.”
Sheriff Ike Keener swept the crowd with his eye. Perhaps what he saw in their faces failed to convince him. “Well, I seen fairer men than you was niggers. Still, you better tell that——”
Mild, benevolent, patriarchal, the figure of old Windy stepped out from among the rest. “Guess you’ve known me, Ike, better part of twenty-five years. I was keelboatin’ time you was runnin’ around, a barefoot on the landin’. Now I’m tellin’ you—me, Windy McKlain—that that white man there’s got nigger blood in him. I’ll take my oath to that.”
Having thus delivered himself of what was, perhaps, the second longest speech in his career, he clumped off again, across the stage, down the stairs, up the aisle, looking, even in that bizarre environment, like something out of Genesis.
Sheriff Ike Keener was frankly puzzled. “If it was anybody else but Windy—but I got this straight from—from somebody ought to know.”
“From who?” shouted Andy, all indignation. “From a sooty-faced scab of a bull-drumming engineer named Pete. And why? Because he’s been stuck on Julie here I don’t know how long, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is,” Steve put in, quickly. “He was after my wife. Anybody in the company’ll bear me out. He wouldn’t leave her alone, though she hated the sight of him, and Cap here give him a talking—didn’t you, Cap? So finally, when he wouldn’t quit, then there was nothing for it but lick him, and I licked him good, and soused him in the river to get his dirty face clean. He crawls out swearing he’ll get me for it. Now you know.”
Keener now addressed himself to Julie for the first time. “He says—this Pete—that you was born here in Lemoyne, and that your pop was white and your mammy black. That right?”
Julie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Yes,” she said. “That’s—right.”
A sudden commotion in the group that had been so still. Elly’s voice, shrill with hysteria. “I will! I’ll tell right out. The wench! The lying black——”
Suddenly stifled, as though a hand had been clapped none too gently across her mouth. Incoherent blubberings; a scuffle. Schultzy had picked Elly up like a sack of meal, one hand still firmly held over her mouth; had carried her into her room and slammed the door.
“What’s she say?” inquired Keener.
Again Andy stepped into the breach. “That’s our ingénue lead. She’s kind of high strung. You see, she’s been friends with this—with Julie Dozier, here—without knowing about her—about her blood, and like that. Kind of give her a shock, I guess. Natural.”
It was plain that Sheriff Ike Keener was on the point of departure, puzzled though convinced. He took off his broad-brimmed hat, scratched his head, replaced the hat at an angle that spelled bewilderment. His eye, as he turned away, fell on the majestic figure of Parthenia Ann Hawks, and on Magnolia cowering, wide-eyed, in the folds of her mother’s ample skirts.
“You look like a respectable woman, ma’am.”
Imposing enough at all times, Parthy now grew visibly taller. Cold sparks flew from her eyes. “I am.”
“That your little girl?”
Andy did the honours. “My wife, Sheriff. My little girl, Magnolia. What do you say to the Sheriff, Magnolia?”
Thus urged, Magnolia spoke that which had been seething within her. “You’re bad!” she shouted, her face twisted with the effort to control her tears. “You’re a bad mean man, that’s what! You called Julie names and made her look all funny. You’re a——”
The maternal hand stifled her.
“If I was you, ma’am, I wouldn’t bring up no child on a boat like this. No, nor stay on it, neither. Fine place to rear a child!”
Whereupon, surprisingly enough, Parthy turned defensive. “My child’s as well brought up as your own, and probably better, and so I tell you. And I’ll thank you to keep your advice to yourself, Mr. Sheriff.”
“Parthy! Parthy!” from the alarmed Andy.
But Sheriff Ike Keener was a man of parts. “Well, women folks are all alike. I’ll be going. I kind of smell a nigger in the woodpile here in more ways than one. But I’ll take your word for it.” He looked Captain Andy sternly in the eye. “Only let me tell you this, Captain Hawks. You better not try to give your show in this town to-night. We got some public-spirited folks here in Lemoyne and this fix you’re in has kind of leaked around. You go to work and try to give your show with this mixed blood you got here and first thing you know you’ll be riding out of town on something don’t sit so easy as a boat.”
His broad-brimmed hat at an angle of authority, his coat tails flirting as he strode, he marched up the aisle then and out.
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 theCotton Blossomdocked 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 theCotton Blossomand theMollie 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 theCotton 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 theCotton 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 good-bye! 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.